Month: February 2011

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 18th, 2011: The Weekly Standard: Hudson Institute Visiting Fellow Lee Smith blogs on the Iranian plan to send two naval ships through the Suez Canal, and observes that the Iranians are conducting “a test, and not just for Egypt’s military regime.” “The Iranians are also probing the Egyptian population to see where it stands on resistance – the ships were headed to Syria, another pillar of the resistance bloc lined up against Israel – for in the end the Iranians are testing Cairo’s peace treaty with Jerusalem,” says Smith. He goes on to say that Mubarak’s departure is a major coup for Iran.”For better or worse, Mubarak was an American asset and with him off the board the Iranians believe they are one step closer to undermining Washington’s position in the region – and since that position is anchored to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, you can be certain that the Iranians will keep pushing on it.” He concludes that Egypt’s participation in upholding Arab-Israeli peace might be under threat as a new Egyptian government takes power and the Egyptian military seeks to avoid a conflict with its own people.

Commentary: Alana Goodman opines on reports that Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi will stand trial for sedition. Goodman sees the crackdown on opposition leaders as a potential boost for the Green Movement: “Like many offenses, sedition is punishable by death in Iran. And while the Iranian government has expressed an eagerness to prosecute Mousavi and Karroubi, such a trial could also result in a backlash against the government and serve as an even greater rallying cry for the Green movement.”

National Review Online: Victor Davis Hanson lists “The Many Paradoxes of Barack Obama” and observes that the central paradox in the Middle East is “The relatively pro-American authoritarians (in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, and the Gulf) are more vulnerable than the anti-American and far more savage totalitarian regimes (Iran, Syria, Libya, etc.), at least for now, because the latter are more willing to blockade the international media and to use brutal force to crack down on popular protests.” Hanson decides that the Obama administration must be pursuing a strategy of “[C]onsider[ing] the more anti-American regimes more sustainable, untouchable, and authentic, and their protesters tainted with Westernization. He continues, “I don’t know how else to explain the administration’s otherwise inexplicable failure to support Iranian dissidents in 2009, or its harsh attitude toward Mubarak versus its mild treatment of Ahmadinejad, or its efforts to reach out to a rogue Syria while pulling back from a democratic Israel.

We are pleased to announce that web developer Doug Sparling has created the first iPhone app for Antiwar.com! Approached by Angela Keaton a few months ago about the possibility of developing the app, Sparling “who consumes most his daily news on the iPhone and iPad” accepted and has been volunteering his time.

“Since Antiwar.com isn’t optimized for mobile browsers [editor’s note: see here],” he said, “I had always wanted to build a mobile app for my own use and as an iPhone user, that’s the direction I went.”

“Initially, I wasn’t 100% sure if Apple would accept the Antiwar.com app to the App store, so I began by putting together a simple antiwar quotes app using quotes from the site. Once that was approved, I wrote a simple Antiwar.com RSS-reader type app for the iPhone, which is the version that’s currently in the App store.”

Sparling has already submitted version 1.1 and is fast at work on version 1.2 “which will rely more on the feeds instead of the site, so the stories will be easier to read on the iPhone.” He plans to add share features, improve the audio and video, and create versions for iPad and Android. Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, the Antiwar.com app requires iOS 4.2 or later.

Sparling’s tag line, “Will Code for Peace,” says a lot as he also contributes volunteer work to FreeGaza.org. For more information, please download the app or visit Sparling’s website.

From David Swanson:

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday about the failures of foreign leaders to respect people’s freedoms, a 71-year-old U.S. veteran Army officer, a man who spent 27 years in the CIA and delivered presidential daily briefs, a peace activist and proponent of nonviolence, the man who famously confronted Donald Rumsfeld for his war lies, the man who drafted our letter to Spain and delivered it to the Spanish Embassy on Monday, our friend Ray McGovern turned his back in silence. As Clinton continued to speak about respecting the rights of protesters, her guards – including a uniformed policeman and an unidentified plain-clothed official – grabbed Ray, dragged him off violently, brutalized him, double-cuffed him with metal handcuffs, and left him bleeding in jail. As he was hauled away (see video), Ray shouted “So this is America?” Clinton went right on mouthing her hypocrisies without a pause.

Ray told Rob Kall at OpEdNews what he had been protesting by standing silently with his back turned:

“Hillary is the driving force, together with a few others, behind the wars in Afghanistan. She’s one of the big hawks in Iran. When I look at her and her husband that they don’t know the first thing about war. I do and so do my fellow Veterans for Peace. I have to make clear that we Veterans for Peace think that her policies are an abomination to the nation, that they are at cross purposes to the country and not everybody should applaud and give her the idea that she’s doing the right thing.”

“I knew that Hillary knew, at the beginning of the war, that Hillary knew how things would go. There was a young lady who was working as Hillary Clinton’s personal staff chief, when she was a senator in 2002 and 2003, was in a class I taught in DC and I’d ask her to give her boss articles I wrote. And she did give them to her. So I know that. She made a political calculation that she needed to be strong because she was a woman even though she knew from us that the unintended consequences would be catastrophic. She knew all that and made that calculation.”

“The height of irony, of course, is that was her tragic flaw that let Obama beat her. She supported the war and Obama didn’t. She is the height of hypocrisy. When people die because we have hypocrites at the top of our government, that compels me to make a statement in whatever way I can. It was not the theme of her speech that I was protesting. It was her war policies and support of Mubarak.”

McGovern told Kall what happened:

“They grabbed me and the shock wore off. There was a real struggle. I shouted, ‘This is America.’ Then I said, ‘Who are you?’ This is a mystery to me. Who were they? The guy in the suit was the one who did the damage. He was brutal.”

“They took me outside, put two sets of iron handcuffs that pierced my wrists. The bleeding went all over my pants. One guy said, “I pricked my finger” like it was his blood.”

“I was bleeding in the car so I said ‘I think you need to put some gauze on me.’ They handed me to the DC police and they told I was being charged with disorderly conduct. I was booked, fingerprinted, mug shot taken. They put me in a little cell – must be the same size as Bradley Manning’s – about six by four feet.”

“It was about three hours that they held me until they let me out. I had to take a cab to the hospital where they x-ray’d me, treated me and dressed my wounds. Then the doctors told me that since this was an assault on me, I had to inform the police about who had assaulted me. A little humor helped then.”

Ray compared this incident to his earlier questioning of Donald Rumsfeld, an incident in which Ray did not stand in silent protest but rather waited for his turn at the microphone and did something U.S. journalists tend not to: asked uncomfortable questions:

“When Clinton started talking about how people beat up and arrested people in Iran, it gave some poetic justice, a great irony, to my standing there and what happened to me then, when she’s talking about what happened in other countries and there I am being handled in a vicious way…God knows what would happen next. Maybe some senior would ask her questions [she doesn’t take questions]. As bad as Donald Rumsfeld was, he let me speak. He let me speak and engaged me in dialog.”

“At the same [Rumsfeld] speech, there was a courageous guy who stood with his back to Rumsfeld the entire speech. They left him completely alone and he walked out at the end, unbothered. Four years later, things have changed.

Tell Hillary Clinton what you think of this behavior at 202-647-4000.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for February 17th, 2011: The Washington Post: Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh calls for the U.S. to “empower the Green Movement.” Takeyh acknowledges that Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern allies are unlikely to support tighter sanctions and says that “it would be rash to employ force against Iran’s suspected nuclear installations and radicalize the Arab populace just as forces of moderation and democracy seem ascendant.” “Whether motivated by idealism or a desire to advance practical security concerns, the West must recognize that the only thing standing between the mullahs and the bomb is the Green Movement,” he argues. Takeyh concludes, “In the end, the most effective means of disarming the Islamic Republic and ending its reign of terror is to invest in the indomitable Green Movement.”

Commentary: J.E. Dyer blogs on the transit of two Iranian war ships through the Suez Canal and the impact the news has had on the shekel, the U.S. dollar, and the prices of crude oil and gold. “The important facts are that revolutionary, terror-sponsoring Iran – under U.S., EU, and UN sanctions – feels free to conduct this deployment, and Syria feels free to cooperate in it,” says Dyer. She argues that the deployment and Iran’s support for Hezbollah is equivalent to “battle lines being drawn” and “Iran’s posture is hardening: the Islamic revolutionary regime is ‘all in.'”

The Jerusalem Post: Hilary Leila Krieger reports on the new Iran sanctions bill introduced in Congress which would require greater disclosure from publicly traded companies that have links to Iran. Krieger interviews the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘s Mark Dubowitz, who tells her, “The hardest part has been trying to find out exactly what these companies are actually doing,” and, “The brilliance of this law is that it forces these companies themselves to disclose” their Iran dealings. Krieger adds, “Dubowitz’s organization has already identified two dozen US companies or international companies with US subsidiaries that would have to disclose such ties.”

The Obama Administration is threatening to use its first ever UN Security Council veto this week when the Palestinian Authority moves forward with a non-binding resolution referring to the settlement construction in the Occupied Territories as “illegal.”

The case for the illegality of conquering territory, depopulating it, and building government subsidized, religiously exclusive cities over the ruins does not appear to be in serious doubt over much of the world, but of course it is a topic of debate in Israel, and like any good topic of debate in Israel the most ignorant and hawkish position has become law of the land in the US, to the point that suggestions to the contrary are considered outrageous.

Which has left the administration offering to support a watered-down draft calling the settlements “not legitimate” instead, but skirting the question of legality.

Of course neither resolution means much of anything in the long run, settlements will still be built and the US will still throw money at Israel as fast as the Federal Reserve can print it. The fact that the Obama Administration is willing to throw its “first veto” at something as frivolous as a dispute of the Geneva Conventions’ ban on settlements, however, seems troubling.