- With the UK election campaign under way in all but name, the FT’s Martin Wolf explains why he doesn’t fear a hung parliament – arguing that it might be just what’s needed to achieve fiscal restraint. “So poorly has single-party despotism governed the UK”, he suggests, “that I would welcome a coalition or, at worst, a minority government.” The Institute for Government, meanwhile answers all your hung parliament-related questions here, placing things in international and historical perspective.

- The Cable highlights the Obama administration’s key people on Iran. Richard Haass, meanwhile, suggests that the West’s strategy must do more to help the Iranian people – with the US and EU acting to “energise and lend rhetorical support to the opposition, helping it to communicate with the outside world”.

- Elsewhere, Der Spiegel profiles the five main risks to the Euro – namely Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy – assessing their economic woes. Charlemagne, meanwhile, interviews Cathy Ashton. And The Economist also has news that Dominique Strauss-Khan, current IMF head, is considering running against Nicolas Sarkozy in France’s 2012 presidential elections.

- Finally, this week saw a group of British Academy experts writing to the Queen about the failure to foresee the credit crunch – a follow-up to a question from the monarch at the LSE last summer. Their suggestion: the need for a better-coordinated government horizon scanning capacity – something that could take the form of a monthly economics briefing to the Queen, which would serve – as Professor Peter Hennessy has commented – to “sharpen minds” of officials. Read the full letter here (pdf).

There are disturbing reports floating around today that the Chinese government has “ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US agency debt with an implicit or explicit government guarantee.”

The FT, and the city analysts it has spoken to, are speculating that the move may be in retaliation for US arms sales to Taiwan and Obama’s decision to meet the Dalai Lama.

In other cheery news, Iran is promising the ‘demise’ of the liberal capitalist system. But that’s supposed to be tomorrow.

December was a veritable smorgasbord of top 10s of the decade, top 100 foreign policy intellectuals and what have you, but now that the new year is underway, it’s clear that there’s really only one list to be seen on: the Iranian government’s new blacklist of  60 external organisations that it’s banned its citzens from being in touch with.

Some of the organisations on the list are just as you’d expect: the Open Society Institute, Freedom House, or Human Rights Watch.  Most of the big US think tanks are there, too: Brookings, Aspen, the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Enterprise Institute. The New America Foundation’s call for a grand bargain with Iran has pissed them off so much that they put it on the list twice.

But only one UK non-profit organisation has made the cut – step forward and take a bow, Wilton Park!

Full list here.

Standards are soaring at the New York Times. For the self proclaimed  ’newspaper of record rumour’, it seems that news is now “defined as anything juicy that catches our eye on Twitter”.

Hossein Derakhshan - or Hoder as he is often known – has been dubbed the Iranian blogfather. Back in 2001, his efforts to tailor Blogger for a Persian character set were a catalyst for Iran’s ealy uptake of blogging, which outstripped that of any country in the region.

When I helped run a blog at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003, we were besieged by Iranian bloggers, with Hoder at the forefront. Here’s Aaron Scullion’s account of our confrontation with Ahmad Motamedi, then Iran’s minister for Information and Communication Technology. We repeatedly pressed the Minister on Internet censorship and arrests of bloggers in Iran – all based on Hoder’s work and encouragement.

Hoder visited Israel in 2006 and wrote widely about it, including for the BBC:

For me, an Iranian raised in post-revolutionary Iran, Israel has always had three great qualities: unknown, forbidden and therefore extremely intriguing. That’s why I finally decided to visit Israel.

But unlike all Iranians who have visited Israel, I decided to publicise my visit to the 20,000 daily readers of my blog – even though I knew I would not be able to go back to Iran again.

I had a mission, though, which would make the risk worthwhile. I wanted to break the stereotypical images both governments use to advance their radical policies.

He then made the extraordinary decision to go back to the Iran, appearing to have had some kind of rapprochement with the Iranian regime. In November 2008, however, he was arrested, and has not been heard of since. There’s been no charge and, as far as I know, no news.

Time then, for the NYT to charge into the fray with a claim that Hoder is – and may always have been – a spy for the Iranian secret services:

Suspicion that Iran’s blogging community has been infiltrated by double agents has sown fears and doubt online. For instance, a few days ago Omid Habibinia, an Iranian now blogging from Switzerland, wrote on Twitter about a rumor that a significant figure in Iran’s blogging community is a double agent: “some bloggers [are] saying Hossein Derakhshan (missing since 8 month ago) is working with intelligence agents.”

They have good reasons to make this appalling accusation, you’d think. Er no.

While there is no evidence to support the rumor that Mr. Derakhshan is cooperating with the authorities in their battle against Iran’s opposition bloggers, the Revolutionary Guard does seem to have established what it calls a “cyber army.” Last month a series of updates were posted on Twitter by a blogger who identified himself as a member of the Revolutionary Guard who seemed to be dedicated to finding and helping to arrest opposition protesters and bloggers. Even if Mr. Derakhshan has not defected to the side of Iran’s security forces, it is clear that some Internet-savvy people have taken the fight to suppress the opposition’s protests online.

Now it’s possible that Hoder has agreed to cooperate – perhaps under torture. Maybe, he even did a deal before he went home. Perhaps, too, the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, is still shagging his reporters. Point is we don’t know whether any of these assertions are true.

You have to hand it to the cowardly shits at the Times, though. If you’re going to libel someone, it makes sense to do it when your target is locked away in a jail cell. Then you can publish whatever the hell you like.

In the light of ongoing events in Iran (which sadly seem to be in danger of being utterly overshadowed by the other thing), various commentators have been focusing on why exactly it is that the regime reserves its greatest hatred for Britain? Surely America is the ‘great satan’? Why are we taking the flak all of a sudden? Of course, it’s historical. You can look at pretty much any world trouble spot, rogue state or basket case, and find the legacy of the British Empire behind it somehow. (more…)

In Washington, Iran isn’t about Mousavi, Khamenei or Neda, it’s about Obama. It’s a pincer movement. The establishment media behaves as if there’s some Geneva Convention stating that all international crises must have the American president in the starring role.

The right, meanwhile, see a golden opportunity to prove that a cuckoo has inveigled its way into the White House – and a Muslim-loving cuckoo at that. Take Andy McCarthy, a commentator at the National Review, who believes that as “a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.”

It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters. As this position became increasingly untenable politically, and as Democrats became nervous that his silence would become a winning political round for Republicans, he was moved grudgingly to burble a mild censure of the mullah’s “unjust” repression – on the order of describing a maiming as a regrettable “assault,” though enough for the Obamedia to give him cover.

Now, both sides have a smoking gun. Obama, the Washington Times tells us, has been writing love letters to the Supreme Leader himself, pleading for better relations, nuclear negotiations and an Iranian takeover of Kansas (I made the last bit up).

On Twitter, the paper’s national security reporter, Eli Lake, appears to have wet himself in excitement (as well as using the opportunity to suck up to his editor big time). She, Barbara Slavin, is putting “more Iran heat than Persian narcos” (eh?) with her bold exposé, he tweets.

Big news, eh? Except that we knew that a letter from Obama to Khamenei was being written in January. And that it was being sent in March. So why the surprise now? Because, whatever else is at stake, the most important thing we can do now is keep the spotlight on the demonstrators fuel another solipsistic partisan Washington squabble.

Update: Reagan managed this with more style, it must be said. His missive to the Iranians, at the outset of the Iran contra scandal, was a bible with a handwritten verse inside. Oliver North took a key shaped cake made by an Israeli baker.

Update the second: To be fair to Slavins, she has an email exchange with National Review’s K-Lo where she makes a great deal of sense.

Slavin: Apart from my paper, most journalists still write about Iran as though it is a theocracy. What we have been seeing is the raw exercise of force on the part of the government and people power in the streets. The clerics have had very little to do with it.

Lopez: What has been most surprising to you about the White House response to the election protests there?

Slavin: I haven’t been surprised by the White House response.

Lopez: Are there any lessons from history Obama ought to heed?

Slavin: I think Obama has learned from the mistakes of past U.S. administrations in dealing with Iran and has put the emphasis where it should be, on the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people. The U.S. has no embassy in Iran and few levers it can pull to impact events there. Aggressive action through the military or more sanctions will probably wind up helping the government, unfortunately.

In today’s NY Times, Roger Cohen observes that “Iran’s 1979 revolution took  full year to gestate”, and suggests that “the volatility ushered in by the June 12 ballot-box putsch of Iran’s New Right is certain to endure over the coming year”. He argues that the Islamic Republic has been weakened in five key ways as follows:

1. The supreme leader’s post — the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose. Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I’ve even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.
2. The hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years. That’s over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can’t turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.
3. A faction loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fiercely nationalistic and mystically religious, has made a power grab so bold that fissures in the establishment have become canyons. Members of this faction include Hassan Taeb, the leader of the Basiji militia; Saeed Jalili, the head of the National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the reclusive but influential son of the supreme leader. They have their way for now, but the cost to Iran has been immense, and the rearguard action led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a father of the revolution, and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, will be intense.
4. Iran’s international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad’s first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan’s murder and the regime’s truncheon-wielding goons at work. The president may prove too much of a liability to preserve.
5. At the very peak of its post-revolution population boom, the regime has lost a whole new generation — and particularly the women of that generation — by failing to adapt. Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy? Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation? The answer has been devastating.

…with the basiji, it turns out:

Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls. It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German companies, supplied the system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions business, which was sold in March 2009 to Perusa Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm.  The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic.

There’s some interesting backstory to the Tehran protests in, of all places, this month’s UK edition of GQ - which, as chance would have it, sent Ed Caesar off to do a piece on Tehran’s party scene not long before this month’s elections.  His observations are fascinating in the light of subsequent events.

The article’s not on the web, but here are a few excerpts:

Two thirds of Iranians are under 30 years old, a product of the huge loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war of the Eighties and the subsequent baby boom. And, while many of this generation have left (every year 150,000 relocate to America, Britain, Australia and Canada), a significant number have stayed.

Now, a minority of the most daring young people – steeped in Western influences through travel, satellite TV and the internet – have created a home-grown scene that is wild, addictive and constricted to the inside of each other’s homes. In public, they play ball with the Islamic regime. In private, they just play.

[snip]

The Tehran party scene may be the by-product of a repressive state, but it’s anything but a revolutionary breeding ground. When politics is discussed at these gatherings, it is only to confirm who will be voting in the elections, or whether it’s all a waste of time. No plots are hatched. But the Iranian intelligence agencies, clearly, think differently.

[snip]

Jafar, a wisecracking 25-year-old pianist whose father was a member of Frozen Hot Tall, Iran’s first rock band in the Sixties, tries to explain what the parties are really about. “Tehran is out-of-control crazy,” he says. “But it’s not healthy. Everyone is doing everything to extremes. I was at a party the other day. There were 80 people there – from 15-year-old kids to old people of 75 – and everyone was so drunk it was unreal. Our use of drugs, our relationships, our parties, everything is so extreme. And, when the police come, we have to pay them a lot to bribe them to go away.” …

One story doing the rounds in north Tehran concerns a rich, gay art collecter who recently threw the mother of all parties at his house in the suburbs. When the police burst through the front door, they not only found people dressed inappropriately, but a smorgasbord of drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. The icing on the cake was the owner’s collection of irreverent artworks, including his paintings of mullahs in compromising positions.  The story goes that he had to pay $200,000 for the problem to go away – an unofficial record.

[snip]

Markan … tells me that he travelled to Germany with his band, Dash, to play some gigs but, despite the freedoms he enjoyed there, couldn’t wait to get home. “I was so homesick for my family, I cried when I spoke to my father,” he says, without shame.

Here seems to be the key to understanding the party people of Tehran. They are a generation trapped between the past and the present – a group who still believe in the importance of family, but who want the freedom to express themselves as individuals. When you understand this, you start to see the parties not as displays of Western hedonism, but as something much richer, and more Persian. They are places where everyone knows everyone. They are family.

“Thank God for these peple,” says Golsa, of her friends. “If we didn’t find each other, we’d go mad.”

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey is itching for Obama to get stuck in to the Iranian regime:

We have an opportunity to get the Iranians to use this thick-skulled blunder by the mullahs to press for real regime change.  It wouldn’t take an expression of support for Mousavi from Obama to help increase the momentum in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere for the removal of the theocracy.  An expression of support for self-determination in a free and fair election system in Iran would be plenty.  Obama could use his bully pulpit to point out that the mullahs handpickedall of the candidates, which has obviously left the Iranians feeling manipulated and unrepresented by their government.  Obama could call on the Guardian Council and Ali Khamenei to stage actual elections, without the GC’s interference, and an election with international observers to certify that the Iranian people are allowed to choose their own government.

Morrissey, to his credit, details the other side of the argument – that overt expressions of support from the US could be counter-productive, helping the Iranian regime paint its opponents as stooges of the Great Satan.

I find this argument much more compelling that Morrissey does. It’s not a perfect comparison – but in Pakistan, vocal US support for President Musharraf cut the ground from under the feet of a leader the US was desperate to shore up. Pakistanis love conspiracy theories and I used to joke with them that the Bush adminstration was, in fact, trying to bring down the Musharraf regime – and had chosen vocal praise as a novel, but deadly, weapon.

So I think Obama and his proxies should remain studied, neutral. They shouldn’t recognise the election result, but neither should they get dragged too far in the fray. (Some of Morrissey’s messaging around the importance of democracy would actually work quite well, if the tone and rhetoric were kept low key.)

Instead, I’d like to see the Europeans (with behind-the-scenes encouragement from Obama) start to play bad cop, steadily ramping up the pressure as the regime tries to crack down on demonstrators. In particular, we should look to Germany – a major trading partner for Iran – to take a lead. (The UK probably needs to take a back seat – for similar reasons to the US.)

Will this happen? Probably not. The statement from the Czechs, who hold the EU Presidency, was not just weak – it was barely literate.

The Presidency is concerned about alledged irregularities during the election process and post-electional violence that broke out immediately after the release of the official election results on 13 June 2009.

The Presidency hopes that outcome of the Presidential elections will bring the opportunity to resume the dialogue on nuclear issue and clear up Iranian possition in this regard. The Presidency expects the new Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran will take its responsibility towards international community and respect its international obligations.

But Angela Merkel has gone on the record to says that the election was irregular and to say that she is ‘very worried’ about events that have followed. France, too, has shown some signs of disquiet. Reuters detects signs of an emerging EU campaign to question the election results. So maybe there is hope.

The Americans and Europeans badly need to find a way to work in unison on major foreign policy risks. My fingers are crossed that this crisis in Iran will see the emergence of a deeper, more media savvy, and – above all – more effective mode of transatlantic cooperation. But for that to happen, we need to see the Europeans pull their fingers out and show they too can talk tough.