Anglo-Iranian relations face new low: AKA spooks on a plane

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…)

On Iran, Washington keeps its priorities straight

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.

Iran: looking ahead

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.

Nokia: connecting people

…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.

Tehran’s party scene

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.”