Showdown Looms In Iran!

What’s this? “Will the real Incredible Hulk please stand up?”

Not exactly. This faintly amusing (to Western eyes) snapshot is actually a portrait of breathtaking courage. It’s a recent body-building contest in Iran where the Ahmedinejad regime has started hanging opponents after perfunctory trials. Rashid Ghaleh Shahini took the stage with his body painted green in unmistakable solidarity with the massive dissident movement.

Tomorrow is the 22nd of Bahman (February 11) and it is shaping up to be the latest and quite possibly the largest showdown between the vast and growing dissident movement in Iran on one side and the Ahmedinijad regime, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the leaders of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (the militia usually called the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Western media) on the other. The day could easily end with violent clashes or even a massacre of protesters.

Continuing to position itself as the true voice of the Iranian people, the Green movement has chosen the country's main secular holiday, the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution which overthrew the Shah, to mobilize protests. The call is national and has been strongly endorsed (unlike the huge demonstrations around the Shi'ite holiday of Ashura as last year ended) by the two main opposition candidates in last year’s election, Mir-Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Both contend that that election was fixed, a sentiment shared by millions of Iranians who first took to the streets in the election aftermath last spring.

For their part, the authorities are doing everything they can to block the protest. They’ve been working to whip up nationalist sentiment by launching Iran’s first space rocket and claiming to uphold Iran’s peaceful nuclear program against US and European pressure. More directly, they’ve already undertaken a wave of arrests of activists, thousands of them. They’ve clamped down on the press--65 reporters, many from mainstream media outlets there, are now in prison. They’ve openly discussed what is being called "the Chinese solution" (a reference to "the Tienanmen incident"--the government-ordered massacre of thousands of Chinese students and workers in 1989). Now, they are reported to be blocking off the square where the Tehran marches are supposed to converge and packing it in advance with basiji, the Revolutionary Guard-backed thugs responsible for so much violence in December.

So what’s going to happen? That’s almost impossible to say, beyond the obvious--more people will turn out for the protest demonstrations than whatever "official" observances the government cobbles together. By at least an order of magnitude. The great danger, of course, is that savage repression will be visited upon the demonstrators with many killed, injured or jailed.

One reason things are hard to predict is that there are serious splits in the Iranian ruling class and in the Shi’ite clergy with some revered figures openly part of the Green opposition, others pushing for compromise solutions, and hardliners who fear to give an inch lest they go the way of the Shah (only minus the free flight to the US). The debates and shifting alliances among these forces are extremely difficult to track.

Another reason things remain unclear is that the movement itself is chaotic and de-centralized. It erupted suddenly and spontaneously, and in the eight months since last June has far outstripped the original demand for a fair vote count or revote. The cry now is for democracy, meaning an end to the Islamic State with its effective clerical veto over everything that happens in government and society. Beyond that? Who knows?

The decentralization of the dissident movement, aided by Web 2.0 and cell phones, has made it very hard for the regime to repress, despite the clear cyber-war raging since the election, with hacking, spoofing, and blocking the airwaves and cable and phone lines common government tactics. This has also made it hard for the movement to develop through summation of experience and debate over strategy and tactics.

Iran only breaks into public consciousness once in a while here in the US. This is likely to be one of those times. Progressives and revolutionaries here should be prepared to respond. If repression does strike or civil combat break out, there will be demonstrations worldwide, organized by the large Iranian diaspora, whose members have, unlike most of us, been tracking events there very closely. Find one near you and take part, if at all possible.

In less than 24 hours millions of Iranians will take to the streets demanding democracy, in the face of great danger. They deserve the full support of everyday working people here and they will welcome it. Shame on us if we fail them!

[Recommended reading for those who haven’t been following Iran is the statement from Freedom Road last year analyzing the sudden eruption of the protest movement and its prospects.]

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Will Israel Attack Iran Or Is It Selling Wolf Tickets?

Today will be the first test of how well the Iranian people’s movement has rebounded from the wave of repression that hit it two weeks ago and weathered the arrests and repression of suspected activists that have become business as usual as the Revolutionary Guard assumes more and more power.

An Iranian friend wrote me yesterday:

By the way, do you know that a massive silent demonstration is planned for tomorrow. The government has closed the universities for two weeks, but the student are organizing. The streets that marches are going to take place have been published on the web and the organizers have asked people who are afraid to march help the protesters by parking their cars at the end of route or even pretending that there is a car accident so as to block the road and make it difficult for the police to attack.

(Yesterday’s FotM post on Iran and even moreso the Freedom Road “Statement on Iran” of June 28 provide crucial context for today’s events.)

But in the last few days, Iran has been back in the news for a more familiar reason—a renewed buzz in the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike about the imminence of an Israeli missile and bombing raid on Iran. This would target Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program, which means its very real nuclear power program.

What’s up?

I have been among the skeptics about such reports for years, starting when it was supposed to be the Bush administration launching the attacks back in 2004 or so. I remain skeptical but there are issues about the current situation that need some thought.

I first became aware of the new discussion when the worthy Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies forwarded this note from Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and progressive military analyst:

Six months ago I was a non-believer. I did not think Israel had the military capability to pull off an effective strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. New pieces of information have pushed me to believe otherwise.

First, within the past few months, we have read that production of a conventional Jericho missile has been stepped up. This is an important new capability. This is a new strategic condition

On Friday, there were numerous reports that Egypt has recently allowed Israeli submarines to transit the Suez Canal. (Some sources say all three submarines; some sources report only one transited.) These boats have been operating in the Mediterranean for many years but have not moved into waters that would give them greater access to Iran with their conventional cruise missiles. This is a new strategic condition.

This morning the Times Online is reporting that Israel and Saudi Arabia have an agreement that would allow Israeli aircraft to transit Saudi airspace to conduct an attack. That makes sense from the Saudi perspective, given their position on the Iran nuclear program. This is a new strategic condition.

My new position, Israel is putting the pieces together to conduct an attack on Iran.

Note that Gardiner doesn’t predict an attack, simply argues that Israel is seeking to develop a capacity to conduct such a criminal assault which it has not heretofore had.

The Administration’s Twostep

What put this whole kerfluffle on the front pages, though, were the bizarre remarks Vice President Biden made on ABC's "This Week" when asked about Israeli saber-rattling toward Iran:

Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else. Whether we agree or not. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that's going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.

For starters, this is hypocrisy of a very high order—hey, never mind anyplace else the US is meddling in, Iran is a sovereign nation and the US is hell-bent on interfering with their building of nuclear power plants or weapons.

More striking to most observers, it seemed like a barely disguised endorsement of an Israeli attack, “You’re sovereign; do what you gotta do.” So great was the outcry at Biden’s statement that the White House made a particular point of “walking it back.” From a Russian trip President Obama denied that this was a green light to Israel, “Absolutely not.” The head of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mullen, hastily chimed in about what a bad idea it is.

Is An Attack Likely?

A lot of this makes very little sense. Take Saudi Arabia. Sure, its feudal ruling family is Sunni and Arab; Iran is Shi’ite and Persian. Let’s stipulate that they are afraid of a nuclear armed Iran and glad that someone else is going to do something about it. Still complicity in an attack by Israel on a Muslim nation would destabilize the rule of the Sa’ud family and its bought and paid for influence within Islam.

What are the calculations in Israeli ruling circles? A go-it-alone attack just might do real damage to Iran’s nuclear program, but bear in mind that those facilities are considered to be widely scattered, seriously hardened and located in some cases in or near population centers. A truly serious effort would have to try and degrade a lot of Iran’s industrial and research capacity, and its military establishment to pull the teeth of a retaliatory strike. This is still well beyond Israel’s capacity—unless, of course, it employs its own nuclear weapons in the attack.

The international rage and disgust aroused by even a conventional attack with low (i.e. in the thousands) casualties would be a heavy price to pay. It may be that the Israeli government and the IDF feel that the tide of global opinion is turning irreversibly against the Zionist experiment after the Gaza invasion and the Obama election in the US, so striking where there’s still goodwill on the plus side of the ledger makes a certain sense. I have seen little to suggest that this is really the case.

Last fall Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was leaving office and gave an interesting interview to The New York Review of Books. In it he fretted:

One senses a megalomania and a loss of proportion to the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of scale. The assumption is that if America, Russia, China, England, and Germany don’t know how to deal with the Iranians, but we, the Israelis, will know, and that we’ll do something, we’ll act, is an example of this loss of proportions.

Now that’s a little frightening.

Another Explanation?

Although this is only my speculation, let’s start with the fact that all the previous the-US-and/or-Israel-are-about-to-bomb-Iran scares did serve a political purpose even as they evaporated. They contributed to the demonization of Iran as part of the Axis of Evil invented by Bush’s speechwriters. And in foreign policy think tanks, the task of the day became figuring out really bad but less dangerous things the US and countries following its lead could do to isolate Iran and harm its economy.

Can it be mere happenstance that all this is happening on more time in the midst of an unanticipated mass upsurge in Iran? I sure don’t think so. Remember that the Israeli rulers and their amen corner among US neo-cons have been ardently rooting for Ahmadinejad to come out on top. Meir Dagan, the head of the secret service, the Mossad, told the Knesset: “If the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally as a moderate element.”

What has happened is a nightmare for them. As the FRSO/OSCL statement points out:

Perhaps the most important effect so far has been to humanize the people of Iran in the eyes of millions here. The courageous millions who are risking and indeed giving their lives to protest repression and dictatorship have struck a chord in the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere.

So with this as background, the beating of the war drums takes on another meaning—it amounts to campaigning for Ahmadinejad and his backer, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The threat of military intervention strengthens their call for national unity, directed at the protesters and at disgruntled clerics and makes it easier to paint opposition as unpatriotic. If the regime can be provoked into bellicose rhetoric and thus more easily isolated so much the better.

This is not to say an attack is impossible, but to point out that the best way to forestall one right now is for us to spread the word on the popular movement there and build support for it and to expose Zionist and neo-con schemes to strengthen the Iranian reactionaries’ hold on power.

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Iran: It's Not Over

The situation in Iran has largely fallen out of popular consciousness as the mediagenic street demonstrations have been repressed and arrests of activists have increased. But the political situation there continues to be extremely volatile and, while things do not look good for the forces fighting the regime right now, neither the popular upsurge been decisively crushed.

The best overall summation I know of, at least for progressives in the US, is the "Statement on Iran" released last week by FRSO/OSCL. You can read it here and I highly recommend that you do. I was gratified when a Iranian friend I forwarded it to, a woman who had been active in Marxist-Leninist groups there during the ‘70s and who remains an inveterate revolutionary, sent me the following note:

Your article has covered the main issues and is quite informative. For us, as I am sure you know, the details are important. I guess we are resigned to the fact that the general picture is pretty depressing and try to find a slight ray of hope to cling to. For example, after 30 years, Rafsanjani's daughter and Mosavi's wife are advocating voluntary hejab (Islamic Dress Code) and not forced hejab. It took them three decades to realize that they cannot force women to accept Islamic hejab.

Perhaps, they might decide to ease some restriction for the young as well, however, I do not have that much hope for the change in the system. Unfortunately, the workers strike did not materialized and there is no leadership for this spontaneous movement. At this point the fight is between the clergy and the secular masses who protested by the millions are not organized. There is an obvious lack of political party to lead the movement.

Now everybody is waiting to see if there would be a mass demonstration next week. (18th of Tir).

When the Freedom Road statement addressed tasks for folks in the US, the first thing it called for was our attention.

We have to keep informed. This may require a bit more work than it has in the past. There has never been a political upsurge of this scope in which the new media has been so central, whether organizing on the ground in Iran or spreading the word in the rest of the world.

In that spirit I offer three recent developments for FotM readers to consider. But first let me recommend that folks who want to follow this should, at minimum, visit the Iran liveblogging section maintained by Nico Pitney inside the Huffington Post empire. It contains first hand reports from Iran and aggregates the best and most timely reportage on developments there. It is updated every day, in real time.

So what is up in Iran today?

First, the Revolutionary Guard has moved even closer to the center of power in Iran. With the Army standing to the side and local police shunted to the side, Revolutionary Guard leaders announced to the press on Sunday that it has been “assigned the task of controlling the situation, [it] took the initiative to quell a spiraling unrest.” Guard General Yadollah Javani declared at the press conference:

Today, no one is impartial. There are two currents -- those who defend and support the revolution and the establishment, and those who are trying to topple it.

Second, the internal differences within the clerical establishment have not abated. The repression or street demonstrations and arrests of activists, and the lack of clear leadership to the mass struggle have made this the main battlefield of the moment. Threats, declarations that dissent is treason and the like have not significantly cowed the reform mullahs who wish to diminish the role of the clergy in the state. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and Mehdi Karroubi, announced they will continue to protest the election they regard as stolen. The day after the National Guard announced “We in charge here,” the party headed by senior cleric, political powerhouse and plutocrat Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani spoke out for the first time since the voting. Its statement declared

We declare that the result is unacceptable due to the unhealthy voting process, massive electoral fraud and the siding of the majority of the Guardian Council with a specific candidate.

Third, the millions who demonstrated, calling for democracy and chanting “Death to the Dictator” have not been crushed—the nightly rooftop chanting of “Allah-u-Akbar” is still going on. 18 Tir, referred to in the letter above, is Thursday, July 9 by our calendar is the 10th anniversary of the last major eruption of protest in Iran, when students protesting the suppression of a popular newspaper were attacked in their dormitory rooms by the police and thrown from the windows in Tehron and Tabriz. Using the excuse of a massive sandstorm, the government has closed all schools and government buildings until after Thursday. SMS transmissions throughout the country are down, without explanation. They clearly fear a revived protest movement.

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Attack On Iran On The Way? Uh, Maybe Not...

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Dennis O'Neil
[Originally posted at Znet]
[UPDATED, with some corrections based on information received from poligirl in an interesting discussion that developed when this was crossposted at Daily Kos.]

Once again, there's a lot of serious attack-on-Iran talk going around. We've both been following this, admittedly with no deep expertise, for several years now. During that time a number of media/blogosphere storms declaring such an attack imminent have whirled up and then blown away. (Of course, we oughtn't to forget that in the old children's story, the wolf eventually does come and eat the shepherd boy who produced the false alarms.) So we decided to sketch out these few points.

1. No matter how much Bush and his coterie may want it, we give no more than 10% odds on an attack actually taking place, and that's mainly just covering ourselves.

2. The furor is not a calculated bluff by the administration to put pressure on Iran. Neither is it a planned distraction to weaken opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq. It's the public face of a tense struggle within US ruling circles, concentrated in the state apparatus. Among those pushing for an attack are Bush, who is looking for the Hail Mary pass that will redeem his presidency in the history books; Cheney and the neocons and open advocates of empire, who are certain that the US can by force of will and arms dominate the world; a minority in the Armed Forces, mostly notably in the Air Force which hasn't been permitted to get their lethal jollies in the region; and the Israel lobby people, fronting for ruling class forces there who want to crush anything that might end Israel's regional monopoly on nukes.

Arrayed against an assault on Iran are a whole range of powerful forces in the US and throughout the world. Articles like the well-publicized Seymour Hersh pieces in the New Yorker recently are salvos in that battle. We identify a few more below.

3. First and foremost, it is the majority in the military high command that is blocking any attack on Iran--as they have, unswervingly, for the last four years. They know full well that even an assault as limited as air bombardment of "suspected nuclear sites" would put US land and naval forces in the region in an untenable position, and they are nervous about the longer term damage it would do to US power, "soft" as well as military.

Just look at three key developments in the last weeks, hardly coincidences as the pounding of the war drums by attack advocates in and outside the administration supporters grew louder.

First, the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth issued On Point II, the second volume in its ongoing history of the Iraq war--which focuses the lack of a follow-up plan for after the capture of Baghdad and victory over the regular Iraqi armed forces:

The army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.

This was intended to underline the fact that there is no post-attack plan for Iran, nor any feasible way to develop one, to say nothing of the absence of a plan to deal with likely blowback in other parts of the region--the preparation hasn't happened and the horses just aren't there.

Second, to follow up, the Pentagon released a report on how things are going in Afghanistan, "its first assessment of conditions in Afghanistan since the invasion began in 2001" according to the Wall Street Journal. In short: Armed attacks up, US fatalities up, narcotics production up, corruption up, Taliban influence up, stability down, and worse to come.

Third, to cap it off, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen announced at a Pentagon press gathering that the US is currently in danger of losing in Afghanistan because there aren't enough troops:

I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq. Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there.

Regarding Iran, Mullen added, evidently for those too dim to draw the obvious conclusion:

Opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful for us. This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable.

Nor is this view limited to the Armed Forces' uniformed commanders. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates late last year spoke to the Democratic caucus in the Senate. In his remarks, as reported by Hersh,

Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preemptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, "We'll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America." Gates' comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates' answer, the senator told me, was "Let's just say that I'm here speaking for myself."

4. The most valuable political ally the pro-attack faction has, despite Gates' warning, is the national Democratic Party. Congress voted $400 million earlier this year to fund and operationalize a secret "Presidential Finding" signed by Bush. This Finding steps up incursions into Iran by CIA and elite military units and the passing of arms and intelligence to extremely sketchy "opposition" forces within Iran. The Democrats went right along with this transparently provocative effort to create an incident inside Iran which could be exploited as a casus belli.

Now before Congress we have House Resolution 362, which 102 House Democrats have joined 117 Republicans in sponsoring. More aqgressive than its similar, but milder sib, Senate Resolution 580--introduced by Evan Bayh (Dem, IN)--it demands that Bush take steps "inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran." The basic idea of this non-binding resolution is that the US will take advantage of Iran's refinery shortage by stopping the flow of much-needed gasoline into the oil-producing country.

Despite a clause stating that the bills do not authorize military action, the fact is that no such blockade of shipping into and out of Iran could be conducted without force. To initiate a blockade without UN approval would be a declaration of war against Iran (and an act of aggression against any country peacefully trading with Iran).

Driven primarily by the politics of posing (The Democrats: Tough on Towelheads!) and placating (HR 362 and SR 580 are among AIPAC's top legislative priorities according to the Zionist lobbying group's website), the bills are actually very dangerous in two ways. First, they continue the ongoing demonization of Islam and of Iran and its people, and promote the idea that the US has the right to intervene wherever it wants on any pretext. To do this at a time when the invasion of Iraq has made the US population very wary of rhetoric about why "we" need to go to war is unforgivable.

Second, should Bush & Co. actually manage to conjure up a convincing Gulf of Tonkin-type incident, they could point to this resolution to justify starting an armed blockade--and a war!

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, incidentally, blusters of Iran that the military option "is on the table" and that he will meet Iranian leaders only on his timetable and "if and only if it can advance the interest of the United States." He has not yet announced what he intends to do about SR 580, which, like HR 362, may well pass the Democratic-controlled Congress in the relatively near future.

5. Overall, the signs indicate that the majority of the US ruling class really does not want an attack on Iran. One clear indication came with the release last fall of the National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus opinion of more than a dozen US intelligence agencies (some part of the Armed Forces, others, like the CIA, not), that Iran did not even have an active nuclear weapons program!

After being rolled by the Bushies in the Iraq WMD fiasco, these crucial institutions of capitalist rule are eager to prove their position "above politics" and their worth to their masters.

It is true that the US imperialists are already in a deep, deep hole in Iraq, with no good options--they can't afford to stay (the growing budget deficit, the lack of troops, popular opposition to the occupation) and they believe that they cannot afford to leave (the damage to US interests and prestige, all that lovely petroleum). But at least most of them recognize the folk wisdom that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

To concentrate their minds, we have crude oil climbing to $145+ a barrel. Economists at major imperialist institutions globally, public and private, are warning of catastrophic outcomes if the trend continues. "Two-hundred-dollar oil would break the back of the global economy," is the blunt estimate of Deutsche Bank AG's chief energy economist Adam Sieminski. Is it possible to imagine a major assault on Iran that wouldn't drive oil prices much higher than that for an indefinite period?

6. Despite chit-chat by pundits, there is no easy way for the administration to finesse these contradictions by having Israel undertake the attack. Even under the extremely questionable assumption that the Israeli Defense Forces (a) have the capacity to devastate what is claimed to be the very dispersed and hardened Iranian nuclear program without US participation and, (b) feel like going it alone in the teeth of international law and world public opinion, one brutal geographic fact stands in the way. Any IDF air and missile assault on Iran would have to pass through Iraqi airspace, which is controlled by the US occupation, and would constitute a US-approved and sponsored attack. Further, the al-Maliki regime in Iraq would have to denounce it as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and turn hard against their own US sponsors or fall in the face of Shiite rage.


So what do we do? Journalists like Hersh are yelling like their hair is on fire, trying to forestall the attacks they predict. Activist experts like Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy work tirelessly to focus the attention of the left liberal blogosphere on Iran and promote options for negotiation. US Labor Against the War and others have called for a massive phone-in directed at Congress. The country's largest anti-war coalition, United For Peace & Justice, has called for protest actions on July 19-21.

Though skeptical of the likelihood of an attack, we strongly support all of these initiatives. Still, the most important thing for us to be doing at this time is to continue building an independent movement focused on ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on winning the 70% of our fellow Americans who are against the Iraq war to act against the war. The stronger that movement is, the more it serves to forestall further imperialist ventures in Iran or elsewhere. Check out the Iraq Moratorium.

And this holds true even if the two of us should prove wrong. An actual attack would mean that even the implacable opposition of the high command and deep concern in the ranks of the powers that be are not enough to forestall a spectacularly unpopular lame duck administration from launching a whole new war in its death throes. Supposing our gritty but fatigued anti-war movement could shift gears to make Iran its main focus, how much more weight would that throw on the scales? They know what we think already.

We have to continue to build on our strengths, to expand the movement and draw in the tens of millions we have helped persuade, over the last half decade, that the occupation is a slow-motion train wreck causing catastrophic destruction in Iraq and irreparable harm to our own country.


Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of www.blackcommentator.com and a co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal. Dennis O'Neil is on the national coordinating body of the Iraq Moratorium.

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