Funny thing: the al-Qaeda bombing of the WTC was a case example of what some (really boring) people call "axiological targetting" (aka terrorism) -- the idea that you can force a favorable political change in a country by bombing the people who live there.

Course, it didn't quite work out that way.

Similarly, the threat of bombing Iran's nuclear programs are also an example of "axiological targetting" -- the idea being that if Iran is bombed, then they'll put an end to their nuclear program.

Course, it won't work out that way.

If you think about it, in most cases, axiological targetting has been counter-productive, causing a backlash and strengthening the resolve of the target population.

Like I said before, one of the many reasons why the "Green Movement" in Iran fizzled out was because a bunch of discredited or irrelevant exiles who had no real gravitas of their own tried to jump on the bandwagon and claim the movement for themselves. Well, just to prove my point, the Guardian has an article about one "Amir Jahanchahi, an exiled Iranian businessman" who is calling for a revolution in Iran, and has organized an entity called...wait for it ... the Green Wave.

I have never heard of this fellow but according to the Guardian, he is a wealthy businessman who lives in London. Ehem. And, his father was a minister under the Shah. Double ehem. And the movement is to be headed by Mehrdad Khonsari, who I have to admit is a family acquaintance. Triple ehem.

Look folks, the Khonsaris and Nourizadehs etc of the world aren't going to topple the regime. About the only thing these people have actually accomplished in the last 30 years it to set up various groups and organizations with interesting names. (Democratic Alternative; Constitutional Movement of Iran (Front Line); Coalition for Freedom and Democracy in Iran; Freedom Front; etc etc)  COllectively, I call these people "ExileTV" because they're so entertaining on their LA-based stations.

 So get over it.

So Iran has officially stated that they're willing to exchange their low-enriched uranium for fuel for their medical research reactor, but on Iranian soil and only as part of a simultaneous exchange of uranium-for-fuel.

"When they (the major powers) deliver the 20 percent fuel to us, they can then take the LEU out of the country."

Previously the US had demanded that Iran simply hand over its low-enriched uranium, and then sit around for a year, in the hopes that perhaps one day maybe the US will see fit to perhaps contribute some bit of reactor fuel for those cancer patients in Iran...or not.

And you see, that's precisely why this Iranian offer -- perfectly reasonable as it is -- will be rejected and dismissed off-hand. Like I keep saying, the offer by the US to swap uranium was never expected to be accepted, and was intended to be refused. The nuclear issue is entirely a pretext and a fig-leaf for a different policy by the US just as "WMDs in Iraq" were a pretext. It has to be kept alive artificially. Even if this offer is magically accepted, the US will still insist that it is a one-shot deal, and that Iran should give up enrichment entirely, and not produce medical isotopes domestically but purchase them (nevermind the fact that isotopes are in short  supply worldwide, and that Iran would lose billions of dollars in doing so.) 

The Prime Minister of Turkey -- which happens to be a rotating member of the UN Security Council and so entitled to vote on any US-inspired sanctions -- has said it bluntly:

In an interview with the BBC's Nik Gowing, Mr Erdogan said he believed it was Iran's "most natural right" to develop a nuclear programme for civilian purposes.

It was, he added, "unfair" of nuclear-armed countries to "manipulate the facts" about Turkey's neighbour while at the same time not telling Israel to dispose of its nuclear weapons.

"Countries with nuclear weapons are not in a position to turn to another country and say: 'You are not supposed to produce nuclear weapons,'" he said.

Well, I guess that's what happens when you deliberately insult the Turks.

I have to say that nowdays I wish there was no internet because what I read everyday is so depressing. I realize that the myth of the US as the "land of the brave and home of the free" was always precisely that, a myth (ummm...slavery?) but nowdays a simply click of a button shows quickly to what depths this nation has fallen, where legal advisors to presidents say that crushing a child's testicles is acceptable, and UN ambassadors openly ridicule international law, torture is legalized and unpunished, and Vice Presidents get their faces spat upon by "allies" and Presidents are apparently entirely helpless in shaping this nation's foreign policy is the face of foreign lobbyists. And that's all just the result of only 10 minutes of casual browsing. I shudder to think what a few more minutes of browing on things such as the cost of education and social disparity would show. (Average CEO pay is 344 times the pay of an average U.S. worker - in other words the average CEO earns in a day what an average worker earns in about a year.)

My God, is this the America that is supposed to be winning "hearts and minds"? This is a slow motion crash, baby, a crash.

Iranian-Jewish friends in Long Island have described to me a long history of issues with other non-Iranian Jews but things are apparently becoming ridiculous. An Ashkenazi rabbi broke into house of a Persian Jewish family in Great Neck who were holding a birthday party for their daughter, and cursed them all for unspecified reasons:

 The actions of Rabbi Mordechai Aderet — and the sheer incongruity of medieval-like curses being hurled at well-off Persian Jews in Great Neck, of all places — have sent shockwaves through the local Jewish community. . .

Said a guest who attended the party: “It was like bin Laden — all they needed were guns. My daughter was terrified after — she was screaming. She didn’t talk for three days after.”...

“The community is moving in different directions in a way that didn’t happen when we were still living in Iran,” observed community member Ellie Cohanim, who did not attend the party. “There is a group that is becoming more secular, and there’s a group that’s taking on this very haredi brand of Judaism — and neither of those trends is normative to the Middle East. It’s not normative to how our parents and grandparents observed Judaism.”

So you've read the news about how two companies are supposedly refusing to sell any more refined gasoline to Iran. The funny thing is this: Iran refuses to stop enrichment and rely exclusively on foriegn uranium fuel for its reactors because it says that the energy supplies can be interrupted for political reasons and to blackmail Iran. So, we're stopping energy supplies in the form of gasoline for political reasons to Iran to blackmail Iran into giving up enrichment...thus proving their point.

Anyway, as for the claim that Iran "lacks refining capability": that's only because Iranians are massive consumers of state-subsidized gasoline, which is so cheap in Iran that neighboring countries are actually the beneficiaries of cheap smuggled Iranian gas. In other words, their problem is excess consumption due to the fact that gas costs less than water, and not inadequate supply. And anyway the Iranians have been addresing the refinery shortage by building new refineries, and have been addressing the consumption side of the equation by for example making cars that run on CNG and introducing gas rationing -- which while it was an unpopular move in the past, can now be blamed on foreign interference and sold as a nationalistic measure that people would support. Even then, there are countries which would not play ball with the US's gasoline sanctions -- Venezuela and Russia come to mind.  Anyway, the whole idea that if you punish the people, they will eventually rise up and topple their regime for you, is idiotic and repeatedly proven wrong. Cuba, a much smaller and less powerful country, has weathered 50 years of pointless US sanctions, after all.

But all of this of course misses the bigger point I've always tried to remind people of: the question of whether the gasoline sanctions on Iran would be effective or not is really not the point. THe proponents of sanctions don't care about that, really. To them, sanctions -- whether effective or not by themselves -- are really just an incremental step towards their ultimate goal, which is a war on Iran to suit Israel. As long as the US is imposing sanctions on Iran, they're not really engaging or talking to Iran -- which suits these Iran-hawks just fine because the last thing the hawks want to see is Iran and the US resolving their differences. And more importantly, as they force the Obama administration down the sanctions path step by step, their boxing-in the administration into a coercive, aggressive policy on Iran which ultimately will end in an all-out war.

For example, lets start with the gas sanctions. Everyone knows  that they will be ineffective, so the next step will consist of the Iran-hawks raising a clamour about the need to "tighten" the sanctions. This will inevitably lead to a maritime blockade and perhaps even
interception of shipping to Iran. And once that happens, its only a matter of time before we get to "pin point strikes" and sinking of ships etc -- in other wars, a shooting war, the real desire of the Iran hawks. By then, Obama will not be able to reverse the course (he probably can't do so even now) and another war will be a fait accompli. 

So Ahmadinejad has reportedly said that 9/11 was an intelligence conspiracy that was used as a justification for the US to launch its war on Iraq and invade Afghanistan. As for the second part of that assertion, that 9/11 was used as a justification for the war, I don't think any reasonable or even sane person questions that anymore. Contrary to all of the efforts at the time by the NeoCons and Cheney to link Iraq to 9/11, the fact is Iraq had nothing to do with it.

As for the first assertion, that 9/11 involved a conspiracy, count me in. Now I'm not saying the same thing as some of the nut-jobs out there who theorize that the planes were empty and set on autopilot, or that there were actually no planes involved (I saw the second one hit myself, with my own eyes) nor do I really buy the notion that the building were pre-rigged to explode. However, I can accept the idea that the event could have been stopped, but was not, deliberately in order to create what the NeoCon proposed Project for New American Centiry called "another Pearl Harbor" which the US regime could cite as a justification to carry out some plans it had previous formed.

And if you think I am being naive, I would like to remind you of the case of one Emad Salem, an undercover FBI informant who had infiltrated the group that carried out the first WTC bombing back in 1993. He was smart enough to record his conversations with the FBI. Turns out, he specifically warned the FBI of the bombing, and offered to replace the bomb material with a harmless substance, but the FBI said no. Now tell me that's not fishy. Go on, I dare you.

Then consider all the opportunities that were "missed" and all the "intelligence blunders" in stopping the second bombers. One or two mistakes can be theoretically possible, but a whole chain of them? Like I said before, how many of these mistakes amount to a deliberate pattern of looking the other way?

Anyway, the amusing irony is that in suggesting that there was a conspiracy behind 9/11, Ahmadinejad's views correspond to the that of around half of Americans. And if you still think this is all conspiratorial, may I remind you of Operation Northwoods.

Manufacturing pretexts for war is a long and well-worn part of statecraft, even if it costs a few civilian lives.

Now let me say that the idea that no Jews were killed in the event is nonsense. However, lets remember that there were a few fishy news items  involving Israelis too including the infamous "5 dancing Israelis" and the mysterious text message warning sent to an Israeli company called Odigo that was sent  just 2hrs before the attack

I wonder if the folks at the New York Times will stop automatically referring to the facility in Qom as being "clandestine" after someone reads Daniel Joyner's legal analysis of the question of whether Iran violated any law in the timing of its disclosure of the Qom facility, which concludes: "it is not at all clear that Iran violated any legal obligations incumbent upon it in the timing of its Qom declaration."

The operative point of the analysis is this:

"This absence of specification regarding the process for entry into force of the Subsidiary Arrangements, in light of the detailed specification of the process for entry into force of the Safeguards Agreement and amendments to it, including the constitutionally required consent of the Iranian domestic lawmaking institutions, is probative textual evidence that Iran did not intend for the Subsidiary Arrangements to be legally binding per se. Rather, the Subsidiary Arrangements would appear to be more accurately characterized as agreed guidelines or understandings for implementation of the Safeguards Agreement by the parties, of a non-binding legal character...

If the various Subsidiary Arrangements agreements between Iran and the IAEA were in fact non-legally-binding in character, the only legal obligation with regard to the disclosure of design details for enrichment facilities incumbent upon Iran would be the provision in Article 42 of its Safeguards Agreement which states that “such information shall be provided as early as possible before nuclear material is introduced into a new facility.”

It is uncontested that no nuclear material had, as of September 2009, been introduced into the Qom facility."

This isnt' really related to Iran affairs directly but it is too funny to pass up. Reportedly the officials in a city in Israel* have started a program to "locate and treat" Jewish girls who date Arab guys.

Moria Ben Yossef, Zman Tel-Aviv [Maariv Tel-Aviv Weekly Magazine] February 23 2010 [Hebrew original here]

The municipal finance committee decided three weeks ago to  give NIS 250,000 [~$66,000] to what it refers to as “‘an aid program for immigrant girls at risk”. The program will be launched this month in the Shapira, Kiryat Shalom and Nevs Ofer neighborhoods. The committee said some of the project’s aims are ‘locating immigrant girls at risk… case-specific family and community intervention to locate the girls… and locating the appropriate figures in the community to treat the girls.’

The program is aimed to treat up to 120 young women under 22, and is jointly run by the Tel Aviv Municipality, the Absorption Ministry (which will sponsor 75 percent of it), and the World Congress of Bukharan Jews.

The obsession over "ethnic purity" in Israel should not come as a surprise since Zionism was the product of the same sort of European "blood & soil" chauvinistic nationalism (aka racism) that gave rise to Nazism there. I thought the fuss over the genetic study paper by Spanish researcher Antonio Arnaiz-Villena was funny - (it concluded that Jews and Arabs are related and Jews aren't a particularly "special" people at all) - especially when the pro-Israeli lobby was so outraged by that concludion they managed to force the publishers of the scientific journal Human Immunology to not only withdraw the peer-reviewed paper but send a message to libraries asking them to physically rip it out the offending pages.  I thought THAT was pretty funny too.

* Occupied Palestine.

As a followup to my analysis of the latest IAEA report on Iran, see Iran's official response to the report posted by CJ Harwood on his site, WarLaw. Thanks to CJ more people can see the role that Amano seems to have taken, which was to be expected as he was the US's favored candidate for the job of the head of the IAEA but was strongly opposed by the developing nations.

Anyway, here's the interesting paragraph regarding the uranium swap offer:

…the Islamic Republic of Iran is still seeking to purchase the required fuel in cash. However, if the Agency is not able to fulfill its duty under Article 3, then Iran is ready to exchange the TRR required fuel assemblies with the LEU material produced at Natanz, simultaneously in one package or several packages in the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Do you suppose the US will accept this perfectly reasonable offer by Iran? Of course not -- because the swap offer was never intended to be accepted. It was just a way for the US to paint Iran as the intransigent party, so as to justify an escalation towards war, the real goal of the US.

If you're ever in Ireland, make sure to visit Carrickmacross and shake everyone's hands there.

There's a website I am not familiar with that carries a story about how drug abuse in Iran is aided by Iran's unfortunate proximity to Afghanistan. An expert cited in the article says:

“It’s simply due to Afghanistan,” he continued. “Opium and heroin [from Afghanistan] are exported via Iran to turkey and then to Europe. They also supply the goods to the Iranian markets, not very much smaller than the markets of Western Europe.”

So far so good -- but the article goes off the tracks by citing "an influential blogger" who theorizes that the regime in Iran is turning a blind eye to drug abuse for political reasons. Of course, not an iota of evidence is presented to back this claim up.

Funny thing, the same regime is criticized for executing drug pushers, and has been extensively applauded (even by the US and EU) for its anti-drug efforts. Every year, hundreds of Iranian policemen die in battles with the drug smugglers, as Iran single-handedly holds back a "heroin tsunami" that could sink Europe.

So Germany complains about Iran's membership in the UN Human Rights Council. THe same Germany that was the primary source of Saddam's chemical weapons. (Apparently gassing people is a "thing" the Germans enjoy promoting.) The same Germany that have given Israel, a racist apartheid state, the submarines to launch nuclear weapons against Iran.

Germany has the blood of innocent Iranians on its hands. It has no moral standing to complain about Iran or anyone else's human rights record.

I have a suggestion for everyone that is looking forward to the Persian New Year. In addition to the usual traditions -- jumping over fire, growing sabzi, going on a picnic etc. -- why not also DO something good and constructive for fellow human beings too? For example, REGISTER TO BECOME A BONE MARROW DONOR. This is especially crucial for Iranians who live abroad, since sick Iranians who need bone marrow may not easily find matching donors except amongst other Iranians.

SO DO SOMETHING GOOD: REGISTER TO BECOME A BONE MARROW DONOR.

I wish the Iranian-American community groups of all sorts -- regardless of their politics -- would promote this idea. After all we can all agree that the slight discomfort and time it takes to donate bone marrow is certainly worth potentially saving the life of another human being. Think of it this way: if a man's house had caught fire in front of you, and you had a bucket of water handy, would you hesitate for a moment to use the water to help extinguish the fire? So why would you possibly hesitate in registering to become a bone marrow donor when its benefits are so much more concrete and important?

Read more about bone marrow donation here and here.

Daniel Brumberg has what is a relatively thoughtful piece (in comparison to the usual raving lunacy one finds in the papers re Iran) in the Washington Post about the state of Iran's "opposition" challenges in which he concludes:

A strategy of state-controlled mobilization and fear mongering might sustain the regime for some years. But escalating economic woes that cut across class and geographic lines, combined with periodic challenges from the urban middle classes, could eventually create significant fissures in the regime itself.

I think Brumberg doesn't realize that this is hardly the first such challenge to the regime in Iran, and as in the past, the regime will probably find ways to coopt the "opposition" (however you define that term - he himself admits that the majority of the "opposition" are not really fundamentally opposed to the basic Islamic tenents of the regime.) In any case it would probably behoove the regime to find ways to channel dissent constructively through institutional means. I think the regime knows this full well as it has done so in the past. Brumberg has made the mistake of drinking the coolaid in thinking that Iran is a "populist dictatorship" without realizing that it has always existed as "a deeply
divided society that pits elites against elites, and popular constituencies against popular constituencies" and indeed this has been a strength of the regime.