The United States under G. Bush spent a lot of time, energy, and tax dollars threatening Iran with either sanctions, military strikes, or ‘regime change.’ The recent election has been contested within Iran both before the balloting, and afterward when there developed skepticism about the truthfulness of the balloting results.
There was the first thought, on the part of both Iranians who were on the side of the challengers, and outside observers, that the election was stolen. Somehow the big winner got there by fraudulent means.
There soon developed skepticism about that story. The thought was, maybe the Iranian people actually did vote in unexpected numbers for the incumbent, in such a way that made the expectant and heartened supporters of the challengers disappointed and thereafter skeptical. One support for this skepticism of the skepticism was the fact that there have been stories suggesting that spooks working for the United States have been working within Iran to bring about what they call ‘regime change.’ The details of these efforts were never specified, however, undermining the legitimacy of elections, and therefore the credibility of the Iranian government, would seem to fit within the range of possible strategies. The United States and their spooks have overthrown the government of Iran before in similar ways.
There is a continuing debate about what actually went on with the Iranian election. Did the incumbent really steal the election. Do the people now rioting in the streets of Iranian cities have a just complaint about their government? Did the spooks working hard to change the ‘regime’ in Iran set this situation up. Did they grease palms? Are they now manipulating the information we are getting about Iran? Is this upheaval in Iran part of an American plan to bring about ‘regime change’ so that some other more manipulable government takes over in Iran?
My own thought, up to this point, has been that the spooks are manipulating the situation and the information as part of an American plan to change the Iranian ‘regime.’ It’s a situation like where a vulture sits waiting for its victim to become too weak, isolated out in the desert, to protect itself any more. Maybe the vulture swoops down and pecks out the poor victim’s eyes to help its demise along. This is the United states waiting for Iran to be too weak or dead to protect itself any more.
But, there is another question about whether the situation in Iran reflects some significant conflict within the country. There is the question whether the theocracy of Iran, much like the religiously oriented governments anywhere, allow for their people to be free enough. Maybe there are a huge number of people who have legitimate complaints about being run by Islamic religious leaders but aren’t strong enough politically to protect themselves. Perhaps in Iran, the rule by the majority has been suppressing the freedoms of a large minority?
Why is there such a push within Iran, and in other places around the world, places such as Cuba, Venezuela, Latin America in general, China, Russia, and Europe, to enforce some kind of top down control of their population? Why is there no real interest in democracy?
When we look at many of the people who have been looking at the United States we hear them ask the same question. Why is there no real interest in democracy in the United States? Why do we find so much emphasis on authoritarian control?
The situation in Iran raises these questions. I think I just don’t know enough about what’s going on in Iran to say whether my Vulture scenario is true, or how one should understand the Iranian theocracy and its relationship to its own people.
I want here to put together some commentary by others who have been thinking about these issues,
More and different voices go on from this discussion by Escobar.
I wrote a letter to will, the host of the political blog American Everyman, saying,
It seems plausible that the spooks have been planning to promote “regime change’ in Iran. There have been stories by Hersh about this. There were not many details in those stories about what specifically they were doing to ‘change’ things.
One idea would be to back some political leader that would promise to be more supportive of American goals for Iran.
This would seem risky and not have much chance of success.
Another idea would be to promote some candidate, not because you liked the guy’s proposed policies, but because his candidacy could be used to destabilize the government. It’s the destabilization and weakening of the government that would seem to further the spook’s goals more than working to directly get someone into office that would be friendly.
The effort to put out the story that the election was rigged, or stolen, just goes to undermine the regime’s legitimacy no matter who would have won. The question of what really happened would not be a concern for the spooks. Though, they might make some appearance of concern.
I think there are a few changes I would make that might help things in the future. Some of these changes would need the approval and funding of our governments. Something to work for.
One of the crucial problems is just how little understanding of Iran independent people have at the moment. We seem really dependent on a few voices. And because propaganda is such a big issue, the fewer the voices, the greater the risk that what we hear is itself part of a propaganda effort.
The same problem occurs with Cuba. The U.S. limits our access to Cuba so that it can control the message. The government gets to tell us what to believe about Cuba, or Iran, and we don’t have our own experiences of those places to independently evaluate what the government wants us to believe.
So, I’d want to allow more travel to Iran, and vice versa. Fund more student exchange. Do more business partnerships. etc.
This won’t help the situation at the moment. But, it’s an idea to help longer term.
Second, I’m trying to find some more independent blogging/ journalism/reporting on Iranian issues. Do you have any advice about that?
Third, It seems there’s a philosophical issue having to do with the clash of civilizations and conflict resolution. We don’t really know how to resolve conflicts very well other than by just overwhelming or eliminating the opposition. I’m working on that one.
fourth, I have been wanting to defend ‘progressivism’ from you and your accusation that they have been tools in this effort to bring about ‘regime change’ in Iran. I guess this comes out of my general sympathy for the ‘left’ in general.
Maybe part of my difficulty recently in trying to think about this is an assumption that the real ‘left’ can do no wrong. I think this is silly on my part. Of course they can do wrong. I think they can be deceived. They can be duped into supporting the spooks in devious ways.
So, the left might want there to be a strong movement in support of democracy or the working class in Iran, and think that this political movement there was a tool to bring about such change. Yet, as you have been pointing out, there is reason to think that this political movement and the claim the election was stolen are just tools created and used by the spooks to bring about ‘regime change’ for their benefit. The spooks aren’t interested so much in ‘change’ to democracy, but change to create another client state.
You have suggested that some of these supposed ‘progressive’ on-line entities know perfectly well that the turmoil is fomented by spooks, and yet they promote it anyway. The suggestion is that they may secretly be working for spooks rather than ‘progressive’ ideals.
I guess I should not be surprised.
This issue tells me that the best thing to do is be clear about one’s argument and support it as well as one can, making sure that it’s as transparent as you can so that one can demonstrate one’s thinking. That way, I think, one can defend oneself from the claim that one is just a tool of someone else’s agenda.
I do appreciate your concerns about this and other issues.
So, do we have much evidence of what’s going on in Iran? Ron Jacobs tells us that we have precious little. He points out,
…Although nobody knows for certain and everyone only has the words of western press pundits and an angry candidate to go by, virtually every mainstream US news source is calling the re-election of Ahmadinejad the result of fraud. There has been no verification of this from any objective source, nor has there been any proof beyond the speculation of media folks who either want to create a story or are so convinced of what they believe to be the incumbent's essentially evil nature that they can not comprehend his re-election. …
Is it true that we have no independent information about the Iranian election? Here, Paul Craig Roberts talks about this issue,
Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”
What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet states?
Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.
However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”*
The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:
“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.
“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.
“The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Moussavi.
“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.
“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Moussavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”
But there’s questions about that poll, discussed on the Real News Network,
The question for us as Americans is whether we are getting an independent understanding of Iran from our media. We can tell that if only we have enough understanding of Iran that we can judge the bias of that media. We will have a limited understanding if we cannot travel to Iran, don’t understand Farsi, or any of the Iranian languages, and don’t share our understanding amongst ourselves.
Here’s a story about this issue, saying, the U.S. government has even hindered its own understanding of Iran by allowing so little exchange.
US has limited inroads to understanding Iran
By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer Robert Burns, Ap National Security Writer – Fri Jun 19, 4:46 am ET
WASHINGTON – During a 29-year absence of formal diplomatic ties with Iran, the U.S. government used many channels to gain insights about the Islamic regime's inner workings, from CIA contacts and meetings with Iranian exiles to relayed information from friendly foreign diplomats.
But the government's lines into Iran remain critically thin, posing a challenge for the Obama administration as it tries to track and respond to an unfolding crisis that may threaten the foundations of Iran's theocratic regime.
Setting up talks with Iranian leaders was a signature feature of President Barack Obama's foreign policy upon entering office. But he had made little discernible progress over the past several months before political upheaval erupted in Tehran last week over the disputed outcome of a presidential election that opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi called rigged.
Washington's lack of normal diplomatic access — both to Iran's hard-liners and its reformers — is now handicapping the administration on at least two levels. It restricts the American view of events inside Iran, where the government has cracked down on independent media coverage of street protests. And it limits U.S. officials' grasp of more subtle political undercurrents.
"There's a huge gap in understanding Iran," said Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, a nonpartisan group that advocates expanded U.S.-Iranian contacts.
"There is no more effective way to understand the perceptions and intentions and concerns of the other side than to actually talk to them directly," Parsi said. "Not having done so in a robust way for 30 years has created misperceptions on both sides."
Parsi added that the U.S. has found ways to get around the lack of formal diplomatic ties, but "there's no substitute for actually being there on the ground."
Washington broke diplomatic relations with Tehran in April 1980, five months after Iranian students occupied the U.S. Embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. In April 1981 the Swiss government began representing U.S. interests in Tehran, providing a conduit for exchanges of messages.
At the time of the hostage-taking in November 1979, the U.S. government was caught by surprise at the student uprising, even though it had a diplomatic presence there at the time.
Now, with a new wave of popular unrest on the streets of Tehran, Washington is again scrambling to decipher Iran, only this time from afar.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090619/ap_on_go_ot/us_decoding_iran
People other than spooks do go to Iran. Rick Steves talks about his trip,
Apparently, his purpose in going to Iran was, partly, to humanize the people for himself, and through a film he made while there, to the rest of his American audiences.
I wondered whether there has been manipulation of our perceptions by our own spooks. Do they do this? How would they try to manipulate our understanding of Iran? Here’s one of many discussions of this issue,
On June 17, The Times' feature story highlighted "Iranians angry at the results of last week's election (marshaled) tens of thousands (in) the streets (in spite of) signs of an intensified crackdown....the government expanded (it) with more arrests and pressure against journalists to limit coverage of the protests."
Scant mention was made of huge pro-Ahmadinejad crowds in central Tehran nor has there been in other media reports, especially on television where, not surprisingly, coverage has been distorted, one-way, and hostile to the Iranian president and regime, much as it's always been.
What's going on? Are anti-Ahmadinejad protests spontaneous or are covert instigators inciting them?
The Pak Alert Press reported that former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig claims that the CIA distributed around $400 million inside Iran to incite revolution. In a June 15 interview with Pashto Radio, he cited "undisputed" intelligence proving interference.
"The documents prove that the CIA spend $400 million inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election" to incite regime change for a pro-Western government. He called Ahmadinejad's victory "a decisive point in regional policy and if Pakistan and Afghanistan unite with Iran, the US has to leave the area, especially (from) occupied Afghanistan."
Writing in the New Yorker's June 29, 2008 issue, Seymour Hersh said "Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership."
Involved is support for Iranian dissidents and "gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program." Perhaps later to disrupt the presidential election with Hersh saying Bush's Finding "focused on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change (by)working with opposition groups and passing money," according to a person familiar with its contents. His account is a year old but may be relevant to today, hopefully something he'll substantiate in a future report given what's now playing out.
On June 16, Computerworld's Robert McMillan reported more of it in writing about key Iranian web sites knocked offline. "On (June 15), sites belonging to Iranian news agencies, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran's supreme leader (Khamenei) were knocked offline after activists opposed to the Iranian government posted tools designed to barrage these websites with traffic."
"This type of attack, known as a denial of service (DoS) attack, has become a standard political protest tool, and has been used by grassroots protesters" in previous cyber-incidents, including Georgia in 2008. Initial efforts were to recruit Iranian protesters, but international users are now being targeted.
Dancho Danchev is a security consultant. He counted 12 Iranian sites under attack, including news agencies, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, National Police, and Ministries of Interior and Justice. Iranian officials have responded in kind to prevent protesters from social networking. Iran's General Internet service was also disrupted for a short time. It's again operating but anything may happen going forward. Computer World said Twitter "emerged as the major source of information on the protests, and is being" picked up in major media coverage.
Of interest is a June 18 Yaroslav Trofimov Wall Street Journal online article headlined "Some Israelis Prize Ahmadinejad's Role." He explained that some high level Israelis prefer him in power. One is Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, telling a closed Knesset committee hearing that his controversial reputation "makes it easier for Israel to enlist international support against Iran's nuclear program." Mousavi winning, however, would have created "a graver problem."
Israeli officials said that in the 1980s, Mousavi "jump-started Iran's nuclear drive" as prime minister. Both he and Ahmadinejad "pose the same threat. But it's better for Israel that you have a leader with a very dangerous ideology who speaks clearly so that nobody can ignore him," according to Knesset deputy speaker Danny Danon. A more soft-spoken president promising improved relations "would have made it harder for us to recruit the world to our side," he added, and the same argument holds for America.
Addressing the issue of a stolen election, Dagan dismissed it out of hand in saying alleged ballot-stuffing in Iran is no worse than common electoral fraud in all democracies. In his judgment, protests will fizzle in several days.
Ardesir Ommni, co-founder and president of the American Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC), headlined his June 16 Mathaba.net article "Iran: Another Face of Velvet Revolution" in suggesting that Ahmadinejad's opposition "is doing its utmost to create unrest and prepare the ground for a velvet takeover" much like others in Georgia and Ukraine as well as twice before in Iran.
It's not "realizable in Iran," he said, "because the workers and farmers, the millions who gave the lives of their children for the cause of independence and sovereignty, defend the Revolution and their real President who has frustrated the schemes and plots of the warmongers. (They're proud that) Ahmadinejad has defied and resisted the war threats and sanctions by the same powers that have ruined the lives of" millions throughout the world and want no part of it themselves.
On June 15, Marxist.com editor Alan Woods expressed another view in headlining "Iran: the Revolution has begun." He cited "dramatic events" with hundreds of thousands in Tehran and other city streets disputing the election results. Some marched silently. Others were vocal, angry and confronted by riot police crackdowns.
"The protests have marked the most serious display of discontent in the Islamic Republic in years. The breath of the mass movement is unprecedented (expressing) the accumulated rage and frustration that has been accumulating for the past 30 years....Power is slipping from the trembling hands of the leaders and passing to the streets....Nobody can say where events will end. But one thing is certain: Iran will never be the same again....the Iranian Revolution has begun!"
Woods sees it growing and suggests it's progressing "through a whole series of stages before it has finally run its course. But in the end we are sure that it will triumph. When that moment comes, it will have explosive repercussions throughout the Middle East, Asia, and the whole world."
Who can say if he, Ommni, or others are right or if Washington is plotting regime change, much like before in Iran and throughout the world. Thus far, events are fast moving with no clear outcome in sight. It remains to be seen whether Iranians or imperial America will prevail, then what happens next in this volatile part of the world.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
I want to say that exposure cures. If there are suspicions that something malicious or criminal has been happening, the exposure of what all has been going on to the purifying rays of the sun will cure all evil. So, we need transparency in government. If there was an election stolen in Iran, then we need to see all the details and look at all the evidence of what went on there, and here, to decide what really happened. Did our spooks manipulate their system? Is there manipulation of our perceptions? Expose the hidden and we will find out.
There is an argument that ‘transparency’ is not always a ‘good.’ Here,
‘India, South Africa, the UK, Japan, Mexico and a host of countries all have adopted major freedom information laws; intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF have adopted sweeping new disclosure policies; and hundreds of multinational corporations have adopted voluntary codes that require them to disclose a wide range of information about their environmental, labour and other practices.’ Despite this trend, Florini claims that ‘publicly useful information is generally underprovided’. The book’s contributors generally share Florini’s outlook: although there is some discussion of the potential limits on disclosure (say, for national security reasons or to protect trade secrets), most identify shortfalls in current disclosure regimes and put forward arguments for greater openness.
Underlying the various arguments, Florini writes, is a ‘fundamental moral claim’ – that transparency is related with democracy. In fact, Florini believes transparency can be considered a question of human rights: ‘A human rights argument combines pragmatic and moral claims, seeing access to information as both a fundamental human right and a necessary concomitant of the realization of all other rights.’
“The assumption that transparency and democracy go hand-in-hand needs to be challenged”
However, the assumption that transparency and democracy go hand-in-hand, which many of the book’s contributors champion, needs to be challenged. A good example is the movement in the West against alleged corruption in Third World regimes. Florini admits that ‘often demands for greater transparency go with a push to crack down on corruption’, and I would go further and argue that combating corruption is the most prominent way in which transparency campaigns express themselves.
These campaigns are actually problematic from the perspective of enhancing democratic rights. For a start, an organization like Transparency International bases its conclusions about the extent of corruption on ‘perceptions’, using, for example, attitude surveys rather than hard statistics (1). But moreover, these campaigns, whether led by international financial institutions or Western NGOs, trample on national sovereignty in the name of fighting corruption; indeed, if transparency is a ‘human rights’ issue, it arguably overrides national borders.
Proponents argue that transparency will bring greater accountability. But in the developing world, the question is, greater accountability to whom? Opening up government spending to unelected NGOs is not the same thing as democratic accountability. It simply gives international financial institutions more control over their ‘conditionalities’, which are actually more about policy prioritization than the sums of money spent. The result is greater subordination of sovereignty to the IFIs and Western powers.
Transparency is a device to prove government corruption and thereby assists Western powers in discrediting governments they would like to see replaced. Conversely, it is used to legitimize governments that they want to strengthen that are not at all democratic. For example, Rwanda under Paul Kagame is a murderous dictatorship that has assassinated prominent opposition figures and overturned a democratic constitution that the previous government introduced under Western tutelage in 1991. But the Rwandan government is celebrated as one of the most transparent in Africa (and as the one most committed to women’s empowerment with many women ministers), but it is arguably the least democratic on the continent.
At the same time, as a chapter by Thomas Blanton discusses, radical organizations try to turn the tables and call for the IMF and World Bank to be more transparent. However, the potential to strengthen democratic accountability through such campaigns is questionable. Radicals who attack these IFIs have a tendency to become co-opted into them; in fact the calls for these organizations to be more open, first aired in the protests of Seattle and Genoa in the late 1990s, are really calls for seats at the table, to join the club.
“Oversight processes create a spiral of mistrust between citizen and professional”
More to the point, the focus on these institutions tends to overstate their autonomy from governments and fetishise them in line with fashionable globalization theories. A true democratic movement would influence decisions on government spending and IFI policy without needing to look at their books and knowing every word uttered in closed-door meetings. Campaigning for IFI transparency might have radical appeal, but it is entirely consistent with an apolitical or even anti-political approach. In particular, it avoids political debate about what these institutions’ role should be with regard to global economic progress.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4135/
It’s an interesting question whether this assumption is true. Maybe it isn’t possible to expose everything that’s hidden. Maybe the effort to expose what’s going on in Iran is just another form of Imperial aggression on our part? Maybe the Iranians should see it that way?
I don’t have any answers to any of these questions at the moment.
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