Iran Propaganda Special: US Soldiers, Bitter Chocolate, & the Prophet Muhammad

Jahan News has an exclusive report from its top investigative journalists: "A Bitter Blow to Islam with Sweet and Bitter Chocolate!"

What could this be? Well, apparently US soldiers at the Shamsi base in the Kharan District of Pakistani Baluchistan have been handing out selections of chocolates to Pakistani children.

Some of the chocolates are the sweet milk variety, but some are dark and bitter. And those bitter chocolates are the ones wrapped in labels imprinted with the name of the Prophet Muhammad, leaving the children with a "bad taste".

The chocolates, according to Jahan News, are making their way across their border into Iran.

(Shamsi has been one of the main bases for American unmanned drones and their missiles. The secret facility was "outed" by a story in The Times of London in 2009. Pakistan had claimed in 2006 that the US military had left. In January 2010 a US military official said that Shamsi is the only base in Pakistan still used by American forces.

None of these stories refer to chocolate.)

Iran: Is President's Chief of Staff Rahim-Mashai Taking On Foreign Policy?

Two weeks ago, we noted an extraordinary speech by the 1st Vice President, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, who pronounced that the English were “a bunch of retards run by a Mafia, ruled by a youngster, who is even more of an idiot than his predecssor”, that Australians are "a bunch of cattlemen", and that the South Koreans deserved a good slapping for their support of sanctions against Tehran. And we asked....

Is this the sign that President Ahmadinejad is taking over Iran's foreign policy?

I have to admit: our tongue was firmly in our cheek, especially as Rahimi went on to say that the dollar and euro were "dirty" and would be replaced by the Iranian rial and local currencies in oil sales, that tariffs would go up 200%, and that students would force their parents not to buy foreign goods. It was one thing for the President to make his grand-standing comments on sanctions, "Ambassador of Death" weapons, Zionists, and Iran's global supremacy, but was he really going to turn loose a coterie of advisors to handle Tehran's diplomacy?

Guess what? My tongue is coming out of my cheek.

On Monday, an EA correspondent brought news that Ahmadinejad had special representatives covering Asia, the Caspian Sea area, and Afghanistan. And, to oversee the Near East, he named his controversial Chief of Staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai.

Still, Rahim-Mashai holds 18 to 20 other Government appointments, so surely this was just a nice little title to add to his resumé and possibly an excuse to claim expenses for a weekend jaunt to Beirut (which is not nearly as hot as Tehran this time of year)? No need for Iran's diplomats to feel crowded out.

Or maybe....

This afternoon, I got this note from a colleague: "IRNA [Islamic Republic News Agency] is reporting that Mohammad-Reza Forqani, Iran's ambassador to Turkmenistan, has just been designated Director-General for International
Affairs at the Presidential Office by Presidential advisor Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai."

So now Ahmadinejad, far from running solo with his foreign policy pronouncements, has his 1st Vice President making expansive claims about idiot Englishmen and slapping South Koreans, and has special representatives who may be seeking to lead Iran's foreign policy in four of the most sensitive areas of the world. And one of those four representatives --- the one who is widely disliked by key members of Parliament and senior clerics, the one who was forced out of a Vice-Presidential office, only to sneak back into Ahmadinejad's office --- is appointing others to a Presidential foreign policy staff?

Looks like I'll need to put in a phone call to Iranian Foreign Minister (or should that now be Foreign Assistant Minister?) Manouchehr Mottaki for his reaction....

The Latest from Iran (24 August): Keeping the News Alive

2030 GMT: Sanctions Watch. A high-level South Korean delegation is in Washington to discuss sanctions against Iran.

2025 GMT: Bad Dog. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has banned Iranian media from publishing any advertisements about pets or pet-related products. The order was issued after a fatwa from Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi.

NEW Iran: Is President’s Chief of Staff Rahim-Mashai Taking On Foreign Policy?
NEW Iran, Political Prisoners, & New Media: Discovering The Case of Zahra Bahrami
NEW Iran Feature: Why "Normal" is Not Bad (Pedestrian)
Iran Document: Interview with Detained Filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad
Iran Special: Have Ahmadinejad and Ali Larijani Kissed and Made Up?
The Latest from Iran (23 August): Political Cease-fire?

2015 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Reporter Ohne Grenzen has launched a German-language petition for the freeing of human rights activist and journalist Shiva Nazar Ahari, detained since July 2009 and facing a charge of "mohareb" (war against God).

2000 GMT: We've posted an evening feature, mulling over the possibility that the President's office, including controversial Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, is trying to take over Iran's foreign policy.

1630 GMT: Karroubi Watch. Kalemeh has picked up the Sunday statement of Mehdi Karroubi, made as he visited released detainee Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour (see 0715 GMT). Their take-away line is Karroubi's challenge to the regime to release political prisoners for Ramadan.

Saham News has also posted a Karroubi statement on women's rights.

1620 GMT: Truce Over (cont. --- see 0955 GMT)? So much for smooth sailing for the Government after last week's Supreme Leader intervention....

An impeachment bid has been lodged against Minister of Agriculture Sadegh Khalilian for excessive import of agricultural products, incompetence, and disregard for the insurance fund of agricultural crops. About 25 MPs have signed a letter to impeach Minister of Energy Majid Namjoo, on grounds of failure to implement plans and appointment of inexperienced personnel, and MP Mousa al-Reza Servati said some legislators are seeking to impeach Minister of Interior Mostafa Mohammad Najjar.

1420 GMT: Mousavi Watch. In his latest statement, made to children of veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, has declared that "the Green Movement has laid the foundation of achieving national reconciliation": “The continuation of the Green Human Chain that was formed [during the Presidential campaign] from Tajrish Square (in north of Tehran) to Rah-Ahan square (in south of Tehran) is being pursued on the national stage and all of us, despite our polarity of votes, different ideas, cultures and ethnicity, will gradually overcome our stammers and will be able to talk to each other more easily.” He added:

The political organizations that had been separated due to wring policies, are gradually coming closer together, talking to each other and sitting at one table. What that is their point of connection is the effort for achieving freedom, justice and understanding to guard people’s rights. The borders of “insiders” and “outsiders” are gradually fading and instead compromise and dialogue are becoming dominant. Today, more than ever, the blessings of the Green Movement of the people have laid the foundation of national reconciliation, friendship and unity among the various cultures, ethnicities, Shia and Sunni and all the layers [of the society].

Mousavi warned, however, "Some who see their interests in creating division and shattering people’s unity are continuing to spread hatred through fabricating false charges and other extensive measures in the name of fighting soft war'....They want to infect the cyber-space that emerged from the Green Movement with their viruses just as they turned the national media to a divisive and biased media with their meddling, so that our Muslim nation loses its trust in this beautiful window that has been opened."

1400 GMT: Reaching Out to the Opposition? Muhammad Sahimi at Tehran Bureau posts a lengthy article, "Hardliners Seek Peace with the Green Movement". I can't quite see how Sahimi's narrative supports that dramatic headline, but this extract is intriguing, especially in light of the Supreme Leader's effort last Wednesday to resolve in-fighting amongst conservatives and the Government:

249 Majles deputies -- almost all of the parliament aside from its Reformist wing -- issued a statement supporting him, and asking for vahdat-e ommat (union of the masses). The most important aspect of the statement was the recognition of the effect of the sanctions and the threat of war. For example, Mohammad Hossein Farhangi, a member of the Majles leadership, said, "Given that the enemies of the people and the nezaam [political system] will do their best to harm them, it is imperative that a united front becomes the top priority of the officials, and those who committed mistakes correct them and come back."

On Saturday, August 21, Reza Akrami, a spokesman for the Society of Combatant Clerics (SCC) of Tehran, the leading right-wing clerical group, said that that the SCC wants mediation between the ruling establishment and the opposition. He said that he had made the same suggestion last year to Majles Speaker Ali Larijani, Mahdavi Kani, and former Majles Speaker Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, a relatively moderate cleric [presumably during the time when there was talk of a "National Unity Plan" being circulated and even presented to the Supreme Leader], but that they had turned him down. Another leading member of the SCC, Majles deputy Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moghaddam, said that the mediation should not be done by the officials, but by those "whose words are influential". The opposition "must become convinced" that the reconciliation gesture is sincere, he said, "otherwise they will not return" to the ruling elite. Jafar Shajooni, a radical SCC member, attacked Akrami for speaking of mediation between the hardliners and the Green leaders. He declared that Akrami does not speak on behalf of the SCC and misunderstands what Khamenei has said.

1200 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch (Nokia Siemens Edition). The Guardian of London has now noted the lawsuit brought by detained journalist Isa Saharkhiz and his son Mehdi against Nokia Siemens Networks for selling and providing technology used for surveillance by Iranian authorities.

1115 GMT: Opposition Watch. In her latest statement, Zahra Rahnavard declares, "The people are the ones who have the hand of God behind them", in contrast to a "government that claims to be religious, suppresses millions of people on the streets, tortures and executes the children of the people, and, with a thoughtless bill called the Family Protection Act, launches the destruction of the families in this nation."

0955 GMT: Truce Over? So what is happening less than 48 hours after President Ahmadinejad and Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani supposedly reconciled with their joint press conference and declarations of co-operation?

Why, it looks like Alef, the publication close to Ahmad Tavakoli, high-profile conservative MP and cousin of Ali Larijani, claims that the President has a 10-point plan to curb the power of clerics through invocation of the "hidden" 12th Imam.

Power game back on?

0745 GMT: Academic Walkout. Shafaf claims that about 50 professors walked out on a speech by Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, the former Speaker of Parliament, at Sharif University.

0735 GMT: Sanctions Watch. Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim write for the Los Angeles Times:

Businesspeople, officials and analysts inside and outside the Islamic Republic describe the sanctions as taking a toll on the economy and ordinary citizens, increasing the cost of everything from the production of medicine to the manufacture of baguettes.

But they also say key businesses and government operations controlled by the Revolutionary Guard have found ways to skirt the sanctions, which ban trade with state-run firms connected to the nuclear program, by enlisting private-sector firms as fronts.

The reporters cite Kamran Vakil, an official at the private-sector Iranian Union of Mineral Products Manufacturers and Exporters, who says the 2,500-member Iran-China Chamber of Commerce and Industries has become more important than Iran's Central Bank. They describe, from "merchants", how the Revolutionary Guard circumvents sanctions, for example, selling old machinery and buying new equipment from Venezuela through Iranian companies.

Daragahi and Mostaghim also describe how some companies are charging others to move funds in and out of Iran.

With prices for both businesses and consumers rising sharply, an elevator manufacturer says, "To break the sanctions through middlemen costs so much. The private sector loses to the military and Revolutionary Guard-affiliated companies. Now the private sector must import items via governmental companies."

0725 GMT: Cartoon of the Day. Nikahang Kowsar portrays the disposal of Presidential aide and former Tehran Prosecutor General Saeed Mortazavi, suspended on Sunday with two judges for their alleged role in the post-election Kahrizak Prison abuses.



0715 GMT: A Sledgehammer for a Hazelnut. Mehdi Karroubi has said that he "never imagined" the political situation in which Iran finds itself.

In a visit to Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour, the student activist recently freed from prison, Karroubi discussed how Iranian authorities had used a sledgehammer to crack a hazelnut, spreading fear among the people.

0655 GMT: We open today with two features. Pedestrian reflects on the tensions between hopes for political change and hopes for a "normal" life for Iranians, while --- with a huge debt of gratitude to EA readers --- we write how new media helped "discover" the case of Iranian-Dutch national Zahra Bahrami, detained since December.

Meanwhile....

Iran MediaWatch

In the continuing tale of how Iranian authorities are trying to shut down news, The Guardian of London follows up yesterday's revelations that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has issued an order to newspapers to avoid all mention and images of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohammad Khatami:

Keeping the society and the public opinion calm is the main responsibility of the media. Security officials have considerations about publishing news, photos and speeches of Mr Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami. Therefore, according to Clause 2 of Article 5 of the Press Code, publishing news, photos and reports about the these people are prohibited.

As EA noted, the Ministry has also declared that media should avoid any mention of the effects of sanctions on the Iranian economy.

Academic Protest

We opened Monday by noting that students at Zanjan University had protested the dismissal of Professor Yousef Sobouti. An Iranian blog follows up with news and pictures of the "farewell" to the academic, including claims that the students were beaten by security forces.

Pakistan: Floods, Bombings, & A Drone Strike (Cole)

An item that caught our eye this morning: there have been 53 US drone strikes in Pakistan during 2010. That is equal to the total for all of 2009.

Juan Cole rounds up the latest news:

As Pakistan’s army and political elite focused on the catastrophic floods that have put a fifth of the country under water and displaced millions, militants in the mountainous northwest of the country struck on Monday with bombings that killed 32 persons and wounded 42.

Afghanistan Tangled: How Pakistan Used the US & an Arrest to Block Peace Talks with Taliban (Filkins)
Pakistan and the Floods: America’s Broken Response (Mull)

The violence targeted figures involved in mediation between local authorities and the Taliban, and were probably intended by extremists to end such negotiations. In Wana, South Waziristan, a suicide bomber attacked the seminary of Maulana Nur Muhammad, a former member of the Pakistani parliament from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas who ran on the ticket of the Party of the Association of Muslim Clerics (Jami’at Ulama-i Islam (Fazl)). This group is alleged to have helped produce the Taliban back in the 1990s so they are not exactly bleeding heart liberals and it is a little odd that the militants should have killed 22 persons at Nur Muhammad’s seminary. Dawn hints that the clergyman’s opposition to the Uzbek expatriates among the Pakistani Taliban may have led to the Uzbeks targeting him.

Also, as elders of Khurram in FATA met to settle a dispute over who owned a local school, they were blown up by a bomb on a delayed timer, with 7 killed and 6 wounded.

As if to add injury to insult, the United States fired a drone missile at a compound owned by the shadowy Haqqani network in North Waziristan, killing 13 militants and 7 civilians, including women and children.

Given the state of Pakistan, you would think that the US could afford to call a Ramadan ceasefire in its constant bombing of Pakistanis. The deaths of women and children and innocent men in these raids makes for bad feeling toward the US, but especially during the fasting month of Ramadan and in the midst of a major humanitarian crisis? That’s the headline you want, ’7 innocents killed by US drone’? Me, I don’t think that policy is appropriate to the moment.

The Washington Post explores the reasons for which the billions in US aid given since 2001 have not purchased for the US much good will in Pakistan. Washington has avoided iconic projects for fear they would be blown up by militants, and most aid is funneled through branches of the Pakistani government.

Back in Islamabad, President Asaf Ali Zardari said that it would take at least 3 years for Pakistan to recover from the deluge, though he admitted that in some ways the country might never be the same....

Read full article....

Iraq: Requiem for A US Mission (Los Angeles Times)

As the US Government declares today that the official number of American troops in Iraq has fallen below 50,000, the Los Angeles Times offers an evaluation of the seven-year intervention:

Those who have lived through the Iraq war have never been certain whether they were at the beginning, middle or end of hostilities. Preparations for the U.S.-led invasion began well before the March 2003 launch of "shock and awe." American forces toppled Saddam Hussein within weeks, but rather than bringing an end to the combat as expected, the collapse of the regime and subsequent dismantling of the Iraqi army gave rise to an insurgency and brutal sectarian conflict. Now, as the United States formally concludes its combat role on Aug. 31, it is time once again to ask: What was the U.S. mission in Iraq, and what was accomplished?

Iraq Video & Analysis: Odierno Sets Up the Long Haul Non-Withdrawal

Hussein was a ruthless dictator whose henchmen tortured the political opponents they didn't execute. He invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He tried to build nuclear weapons, and he used chemical weapons against Iran as well as against his own citizens, killing at least 5,000 Kurds in Halabja alone in March 1988. All told, more than 180,000 Kurdish men, women and children were slaughtered in his Anfal campaign in the north. Meanwhile, the regime drained marshes and starved hundreds of thousands of Shiite Arabs out of the south. These were horrible crimes committed over decades, many of them long before President George W. Bush decided to seek a "regime change." But did they warrant a U.S. invasion?

The Bush administration made the decision to go to war in Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that were plotted by Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and carried out by Saudis, not by Iraqis. It offered many reasons for turning its sights on Iraq. First, Bush made the radical case that the attacks in the United States justified preemptive strikes against potential threats to Americans. He said it was necessary to disarm Hussein, who allegedly was hiding a program to develop weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The administration claimed a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda and warned that Hussein could provide the terrorists with WMD. Neoconservative ideologues added that removing Hussein would open the way for a democratic government in Iraq and have a ripple effect throughout the Middle East — domino democracy — that would stabilize the region.

Opponents of the war ascribed other motives to Bush: He sought to "finish the job" for his father, who stopped short after driving Hussein out of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, or, as many Iraqis believed, he wanted to get his hands on Iraqi oil.

At least 4,415 American troops died in combat, and tens of thousands were wounded. Iraqi casualties have been harder to count. The Iraq Body Count's website puts the civilian death toll between 97,000 and 106,000; hundreds of thousands were wounded, and many others displaced, forced into exile. The Bush administration initially calculated that the war would run $50 billion. Seven years later, the bill is tallied at about $750 billion, and nearly as much likely will be needed to tend to the physically and psychologically wounded service members who have returned. By any measure, the price has been high in blood and treasure, and in the damage to American moral authority.

From the beginning, this page argued against the war, saying the administration had failed to prove that Hussein had WMD or a connection to the 9/11 perpetrators. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld famously responded to skeptics by asserting that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The administration pointed to suspect aluminum tubes and alleged mobile bio-laboratories, and went to war despite the opposition of most of its allies and without United Nations approval.

After the fall of Hussein, it quickly became clear that the administration had been seeing things it wanted to find rather than finding the truth. There were no WMD; no 9/11 plotters in Iraq. Bush had taken the country to war on false pretenses. The United States was not safer after the war, because there had been no imminent threat before it. Arguably, Americans were more at risk. Al Qaeda exploited Iraqi resentment of U.S. troops, who were viewed as occupiers rather than liberators by much of the Muslim world. Abuses committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison fanned anger and anti-Americanism. Though Al Qaeda was not a force in Iraq before the war, it was after. And rather than stabilizing the region, the war shook a strategic balance. Hussein's Sunni regime had served as a useful if unsavory counterweight to the Shiite government of Iran.

Read the full editorial....