iran

In recent months President Ahmadinejad has been trying to curry favor with Iranian middle class voters who disassociate themselves from fundamentalist religious views.  This, in turn, has created a backlash from some hard line clerics such as Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi and Mesbah Yazdi.  As a reaction to this struggle the political elite have started to crack down and enforce religious behavior like never before.  This Ramadan hundreds of thousands of people have been stopped, searched and questioned for eating drinking and listening to loud music.  Iran’s most popular soccer players Ali Karimi was fired from his club because he ate during the fast.  Within one day, 10,000 Iranians joined a group on Facebook to support him proving that the Iranian people are sick and tired of this kind of oppressive behavior.

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Reuters reported that Iran has stated that its passenger planes have been refused refueling in Germany, the UK and the UAE. This is a sanction that could have a very real impact on the daily lives of Iranians.

Reuters quoted an Iranian lawmaker: "Iran will do the same to ships and planes of those countries that cause problems for us," ISNA quoted Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh as saying.

Have you seen sanctions in action? We want to hear from you as we stay tuned and evaluate the repercussions and impact of these sanctions.

In this Wall Street Journal article, Michael Ledeen reviews the brewing revolution, on the first anniversary of the last year's election.

"Today is the first anniversary of the fraudulent election that kept President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power, igniting huge demonstrations all over Iran. At the time, very few outside observers believed that most Iranians hated the regime of "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei and Mr. Ahmadinejad and were willing to risk their lives to bring it down.

Having failed to recognize the intensity and dimensions of the opposition, many Iran observers performed a neat about-face, concluding that the regime was doomed and would be brought down in the near future. Yet while there have been many demonstrations this past year, the regime has brutally fought back, killing or arresting hundreds if not thousands of real or suspected critics. Although not a day goes by without protests (typically at universities), large, organized demonstrations are too risky."

Click here to read the whole article. 

Learn about the Iranian nuclear threat in this special exclusive clip from The Third Jihad.

Is the Iranian government interested in finding peaceful solutions to the standoff with the West?

Its own internal politics don’t seem to bear this out. Speaking on the recent opposition movement, a representative of Iran’s supreme leader said recently that it would be worth it to kill 75,000 Iranians for the regime to survive. This is grim, but unsurprising. The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, himself said, “Those who say Islam should not kill don’t understand [it]. Killing is a great [divine] gift that appears [to man]. A religion that does not include [provisions for] killing and massacre is incomplete.”

In light of this, it should come as little surprise that in the early ‘80s Tehran hosted a fountain of faux blood, ostensibly as a way of intimidating its enemies. Radio Free Europe recently translated an Iranian blog about this infamous fountain.

In the early years of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, a pond with several sections was built near an area dedicated to martyrs at the Beheshte Zahra graveyard in Tehran. Its fountain spurted blood. It became known as the "Pond of Blood." Obviously, it was not actual blood but only red coloring mixed in the water.

The fame of this pond even reached overseas, to the point that foreign journalists would strive to take pictures of it.

Once, the Iranian daily “Etelaat” published a special issue about the war with a picture of the fountain on the cover, with a caption consisting of a saying by Imam Khomeini: "All in all, our revolution was a blessing."

The publication of that picture with that caption provoked the rage of the Hizbullahi fellows and protests began. The forces of the Revolutionary Guards were sent to the newspaper's offices to arrest and punish those behind the publication. In the end, the matter was solved by the dismissal of a few "Etelaat" employees and an apology from the head of the newspaper.

The construction of the pond, which had a symbolic and propaganda value, proved to be more painful to the families of the martyrs than to Iran's enemies. Hence, the bloody water was removed and now normal water flows in it.

There may still be peaceful avenues available to resolve this crisis, including sanctions against the regime’s primary supports and support for the opposition movement. But, it may not be reasonable to assume that a regime which considers it rational to kill thousands of its own people, and which celebrates death, would be quick to compromise with a West it may view with even greater enmity than an opposition movement.

In today’s Washington Post

U.N. nuclear inspectors, citing evidence of an apparently ongoing effort by Iran to obtain new technologies, publicly suggested for the first time Thursday that the country is actively seeking to develop a weapons capability.

According to the IAEA report, experiments related to nuclear explosives continued beyond 2004—which contradicts U.S. intelligence claims that such activities ceased in 2003.

Iran has amassed upwards of two tons of enriched uranium—sufficient for an atomic bomb. Using centrifuges at the Natanz facility, the material could be enriched to weapons grade quality within a year and a half.

You can read the Washington Post story here.

The IAEA report can be viewed here.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week on a push by two California officials to divest from Iran.

[They] are pushing insurers and the state's two major pension funds to sell more than $6 billion worth of holdings in companies doing business in Iran. Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is expected Wednesday to ask hundreds of state-licensed insurance companies to pull money out of 50 foreign-owned corporations he said are involved in Iran's nuclear, military and energy sectors.

The push follows moves by the Treasury Department to impose sanctions as a way of forcing the regime to curb its nuclear program. The sanctions have largely targeted the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Doha last week that the U.S. feared the IRGC was gradually seizing control of the state, with the potential to transform it into a military dictatorship.

According to RAND the IRGC

[controls] an array of subsidiary companies that have penetrated virtually every sector of the Iranian market—from construction and real estate to laser eye surgery and automobile manufacturing. Reportedly, the IRGC also operates illicit smuggling networks that constitute a vast shadow economy.

Tactics like sanctions and divestment are not failsafe mechanisms, as the regime has found ways to disguise some of its business dealings. Nevertheless, they are important resources to help curb the nuclear threat, when applied to Iranian business interests, as well as when applied to any company doing business with the regime.

You can read the Los Angeles Times article here.