Reason Magazine - Topics > Middle East > Iran

Reading the Tea Leaves

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:15:00 EDT

Something I meant to blog last week: Gary Sick's argument that the neoconservatives are on the outs in Washington, war with Tehran is unlikely, and a general shift in U.S. foreign policy is underway. Here's the basic thesis:

Ever since the congressional elections of 2006, the US has been in the process of a fundamental change in its policy on a number of key issues: the Arab-Israel dispute, the North Korean nuclear issue, and Iran. Since the administration proclaims loudly that its policies have not changed, and since the tough rhetoric of the past dominates the discussion, it is easy to overlook what is actually going on.

Sick's comments were framed as a reaction to a Wall Street Journal article by John Bolton, who as you'd expect is livid at the changes. Now more evidence for Sick's storyline has surfaced: an equally aghast editorial in neocon central, The Weekly Standard, headlined "'Stunningly Shameful'" and subtitled "The Bush administration flip-flops on Iran." Throw in the frustrations of the McCain campaign, which lately seems unable to do anything but flail about powerlessly, and it's hard to avoid that thought that, for the time being at least, Sick is right.

[Standard story via Jim Lobe.]

Meanwhile in Iran...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:42:00 EDT

Iran has launched nine missiles, as a sign that it's got some push-back capabilities in response to possible attacks from Israel or the U.S., according to news reports.

So how are presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) responding?

Here's Obama:

"I think what this underscores is the need for us to create a kind of policy that is putting the burden on Iran to change behavior. And, frankly, we just have not been able to do that over the last several years. Partly because we're not engaged in direct diplomacy."

Obama has also suggested we need economic sanctions against Iran. And here's McCain:

"Iran's most recent missile tests demonstrate again the dangers it poses to its neighbors and to the wider region, especially Israel. Ballistic missile testing coupled with Iran's continued refusal to cease its nuclear activities should unite the international community in efforts to counter Iran's dangerous ambitions."

More here.

And here's The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh on stepped-up covert operations against Iran, which were suspended (according to press reports) in the immediate run-up to the invastion of Iraq:

Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program.

More here.

reason on "the next Iranian Revolution."

The Return of Persian Ameriphilia?

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:29:00 EDT

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran this fascinating story by Azadeh Moaveni, author of Lipstick Jihad and Time magazine's Iran correspondent, tracking Iranian's ever-shifting attitudes towards America and Americans. Long considered the most pro-American country in the region—world's tallest midget, obviously—opinion towards The Great Satan, Moavenu argues, has ebbed and flowed during the Bush years. Back in 2004, Nicolas Kristof wrote that he had finally "found a pro-American country." The twist was, of course, that he was writing from Tehran. Kristof spoke with an inordinate number of Iranians who were "exceptionally friendly and fulsome in their praise for the United States, and often for President Bush as well." Well, that was 2004.

According Moaveni, public opinion turned against Bush and America the following year: "Starting in about 2005, Iranians' historic esteem for the United States gave way to a deep ambivalence that is only now ending. President Bush's post-9/11 wars of liberation on both of Iran's borders—in Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east—rattled ordinary Iranians, and Washington's opposition to Iran's nuclear programa major source of national pride—added to their resentment." But the sands, she argues, are again shifting:

"I used to hear similarly pro-American sentiments frequently back in 2001, when Iranians' romance with the United States was at its most ardent. A poll conducted that same year found that 74 percent of Iranians supported restoring ties with the United States (whereupon the pollster was tossed into prison). You couldn't attend a dinner party without hearing someone, envious of the recently liberated Afghans, ask, "When will the Americans come save us?"

It's highly unlikely that this is a widely held sentiment these days. But, Moaveni writes, the incompetent and corrupt rule of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shifted the focus from problems in countries that border Iran (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq) to more pressing economic problems at home:

"I lived in Iran until last summer and experienced all the reasons why Ahmadinejad has replaced the United States as Iranians' top object of vexation. Under his leadership, inflation has spiked at least 20 percent, according to nongovernment analysts—thanks to Ahmadinejad's expansionary fiscal policies, which inject vast amounts of cash into the economy. My old babysitter, for example, says she can no longer afford to feed her family red meat once a week. When I recently picked up some groceries—a sack of potatoes, some green plums, two cantaloupes and a few tomatoes—the bill came to the equivalent of $40.

Full story.

Mythmaking for the Next War

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had some 45,000 nuclear warheads. At the moment, Iran has none. But when Barack Obama said the obvious—that Iran does not pose the sort of threat the Soviet Union did—John McCain reacted as though his rival had offered to trade Fort Knox for a sack of magic beans.

"Such a statement betrays the depth of Sen. Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment," exclaimed McCain. "These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess."

But if Iran is the Soviet Union, I'm Shaquille O'Neal. There is nothing reckless in soberly distinguishing large threats from small ones, and there is something foolhardy in grossly exaggerating the strength of your enemies.

As military powers go, Iran is a pipsqueak. It has no nuclear weapons. It has a pitiful air force. Its navy is really just a coast guard. It spends less on defense than Singapore or Sweden. Our military budget is 145 times bigger than Iran's.

By contrast, the Soviets had far more nuclear weapons than we did, a blue-water navy, formidable air power and ground forces that dwarfed ours. In a conventional war, it was anything but certain that we could prevail, and in a nuclear exchange, it was clear they could destroy us.

Iran is a very modest adversary. Of course, even a Chihuahua can bite. The U.S. government claims Iran has provided arms and training to Iraqi insurgents—never mind that it is allied with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

But it's worthwhile to remember that even bad regimes sometimes have understandable motivations. The United States helped overthrow a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and provided aid to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. If Iran sees an interest in bleeding the U.S. military, that is likely a defensive response to the presence of an avowed enemy on its border rather than a sign of aggressive intent.

Its actions in Iraq, however, are supposedly the least of the menace. McCain and many others are convinced that Iran will soon get nuclear weapons and proceed to use them.

The first claim overlooks the Bush administration's own National Intelligence Estimate, issued last year, which concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The NIE also said, "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs."

Even if Iran were to acquire atomic bombs, there is no reason to think it would use them or turn them over to terrorists. McCain, however, insists that Iran has "a commitment to Israel's destruction," and appears to think its leaders cannot be contained because of their religious fanaticism.

But as University of Michigan Middle East scholar Juan Cole has explained, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never vowed to "wipe Israel off the map"—an oft-quoted phrase that Cole says is a mistranslation of the milder words he used. In fact, he says, "Ahmadinejad has never threatened Israel with physical aggression," however much he would welcome its collapse.

Even if the Iranians would like to destroy Israel, they face a powerful disincentive: the prospect of radioactive incineration. The Tehran government has been intimidated by less. Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg writes in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "Iran agreed to a ceasefire in the war with Iraq once Iraqi missiles began falling on Tehran. The ayatollahs were willing to sacrifice soldiers—but not to pay a higher price." Even fanatics have their limits.

Nor would Iran be so irrational as to give nukes to a terrorist group. That would be the worst of both worlds— giving up control of those weapons, while inviting annihilation the moment they are put to use.

But there is no reasoning with McCain and his allies, who yearn for the simple clarity of the Cold War. If we don't have an enemy on the mammoth scale of the Soviet Union, they will take a pint-sized one, inflate it beyond recognition and pretend that military confrontation is the only way to deal with it.

That was how we got into the war in Iraq and how, under a McCain presidency, we are liable to end up in a war in Iran. If he's looking for reckless judgment, he should look in the mirror.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Kidneys for Sale

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“What can Iran teach us about good governance?” is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need.

As Hippen explains in a March report for the Cato Institute, the Iranian government has been paying kidney donors since 1988. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, donors and recipients work through an independent organization known as the Dialysis and Transplant Patient Association. Donors approach the association on their own; they cannot be recruited by physicians or referred by brokers with financial incentives. They receive $1,200 and limited health coverage from the government, in addition to direct remuneration from the recipient—or, if the recipient is impoverished, from one of several charitable organizations. The combination of charitable and governmental payments ensures that poor recipients are treated as well as wealthy ones.

Critics of organ markets often claim that where payments are permitted, altruistic donation will drop off. Hippen found this is not the case in Iran. The country’s deceased donor program, started in 2000, has grown steadily alongside paid donation. (Posthumous donations are not remunerated.) During the last eight years, deceased donations have increased tenfold.

Data on the long-term health of Iranian kidney doors is mixed and inconclusive, so Hippen recommends that any U.S. system closely track donors and provide them with lifelong health care. Since many potential kidney recipients are currently surviving on vastly more expensive dialysis treatment (paid for by Medicare), providing donors with long-term health care is probably more cost-effective than the status quo.

American critics continue to lament that Iran failed to adopt the U.S. policy of banning payment for organs in the mid-1980s. “Carrying this reasoning to its conclusion,” writes Hippen, “would entail admitting that in so doing, Iran would have also incurred our current shortage of organs, our waiting list mortality, and our consequent moral complicity in generating a state of affairs that sustains an international market in illegal organ trafficking.” No other country has managed to eliminate its kidney waiting list; the U.S. has a list 73,000 patients long. Who should be advising whom?

New at Reason

Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Contributing Editor Greg Beato makes the case for drafting Barbie and waging culture war on Iran.

Read all about it here.

Drop Barbies, Not Bombs, on Iran

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Despite Hillary Clinton's penchant for magnificently monochromatic pantsuits that are just a couple epaulets short of colonel status in Michael Jackson's toddler army, the bellicose Democratic senator from New York is apparently incapable of intimidating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a recent appearance on Good Morning America, Clinton told ABC News' Chris Cuomo that she will definitely attack Iran if it launches a nuclear strike against Israel, and even added a dash of swaggering trash-talk to her promise. "Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel," she exclaimed, "we would be able to totally obliterate them."

But while Clinton's saber-rattling may have unnerved lesser Iranian officials such as Amb. Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi, who lodged a formal complaint to the United Nations, Ahmadinejad appeared unmoved by Clinton's morning-chat bravado. "Presidency of a woman in a country that boasts its gunmanship is unlikely," he quipped.

Meanwhile, Iran is terrified of Barbie, the tiny polyvinyl sex bomb who loves shopping, pizza, and brushing her hair, but has few satellite-guided missiles at her disposal. According to Iran's Prosecutor General, Ghorban Ali Dori Najfabadi, a loosely organized coalition, led by the world's most impeccably accessorized mercenary but also including additional combatants like Harry Potter and Spider-man, is doing "irreparable damage" to Iranian children. "The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger," Najafabadi cautioned (doubtless worried about the effect on sales of Iran's "official doll," Sara).

In the long run, of course, a Barbie revolution would be more devastating—and humiliating—to Iran's theocracy than a nuclear strike. Fundamentalists of all stripes inevitably fear homegrown dissidents more than foreign aggression: The prospect of annihilation is more palatable than the specter of choice. In Iran, the prosecutor general is battling plastic dolls. In the U.S., the American Family Association (AFA), armed to the teeth with adjectives, is decrying the "explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing" that recently occurred on As the World Turns, the long-running soap opera underwritten by consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble.

In August 2007, As the World Turns made history when it showed a kiss between two gay male characters, Noah and Luke, or as their fans refer to them, "Nuke." In the months that followed, their romance continued, albeit with only one additional instance of same-sex first base action. Suddenly, in fact, even modest, closed-mouth homosexual air-kissing seemed off-limits—whenever the characters seemed on the verge of smooching, the camera panned away. Viewers took note of this uncharacteristic discretion and began campaigning for another kiss; a couple weeks ago, the show delivered. (And now the American Family Association would like you to see it too.)

According to the AFA, Procter & Gamble wants to "desensitize viewers to the homosexual lifestyle and help make the unhealthy and immoral lifestyle more acceptable to society, especially to children and youth." No doubt this is because Procter & Gamble's main business is selling Tide, Crest, and Pampers, and the unhealthy and immoral gay lifestyle inevitably leads to a pathological obsession with clean laundry, cavity prevention, and baby care.

In the case of Barbie, there in no multinational conglomerate driving the agenda. Mattel doesn't officially deploy its unlikely freedom fighter to Iran; the Barbies who show up in Tehran shop windows are smuggled into the country, the victims of international doll trafficking. Once there, however, they make the best of it, embodying the traditional American values of self-determination and haircare—and potentially exposing impressionable Iranian minds to phenomena as diverse as Frank Sinatra, the occult, investment opportunities involving miniature dog poop, and who knows what else.

Contemplating such matters, an obvious question arises: If Barbie's marginal and haphazard presence in Iran is so disruptive, what kind of impact might she have there if a more orchestrated effort to put additional sexy white boots on the ground was implemented? Luckily, the relative economy of a Barbie surge—an army of 200,000 cheerleaders for Western decadence can be mustered for the price of a dozen Tomahawk missiles—means our government isn't likely to get involved any time soon. If anything could dampen Barbie's revolutionary power, official U.S. sanction just might; the people of Iran already have one government too many trying to manage their doll-play.

Best just keep filling up your SUV, gas prices be damned. According to the Associated Press, the increasing presence of smuggled Barbies in Iran is "partly due to a dramatic rise in purchasing power as a result of increased oil revenues." As long as America's expressways remain bumper-to-bumper every weekday afternoon, hope for democracy in Iran exists.

And if we could aim a few gay soap opera Nukes their way, so much the better. After all, hardcore mullahs and old-school feminists aren't the only ones who despise Barbie's vacant but empowering gaze. In 2002, an AFA spokesman decried a pregnant version of Barbie's married sidekick Midge that featured a trap-door stomach with an adorable unborn baby inside it, exclaiming that "Mattel should stay out of the 'birds and bees' business and leave adult themes alone." (Yes, you read that right; the American Family Association is officially against childbirth.)

In 2006, Robert Knight, the confusingly virile president of Concerned Women of America, accused Barbie.com of trying to promote "bisexuality gender confusion" among visitors to its site, based on a poorly worded question in a survey that the site quickly amended. These days, however, such groups apparently don't have the troop strength to maintain a presence in every zone of the Culture Wars—they're too busy waging war on imaginary homosexuals to do battle with Barbie too.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Al Qaeda No. 2 Slags U.S., Iran, Sunnis, Starbucks Coffee

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:35:00 EDT

From the AP, via the Cincy Enquirer:

Al-Qaida's No. 2 said in an audiotape released Friday that the United States will lose whether it stays in Iraq or withdraws, and he sneered that President Bush just wants to pass the problem on to his successor....
"The truth is that if Bush keeps all his forces in Iraq until doomsday and until they enter hell, they will only see crisis and defeat by the will of God," said al-Zawahri, the deputy of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.
"If the American forces leave, they will lose everything. And if they stay, they will bleed to death," he said....
He said Tehran "has clear goals, which are the annexation of southern Iraq and the east of the Arabian Peninsula" as well as strengthening ties to its followers in southern Lebanon.
He said that if Iran achieves its goals, "this will add oil to the fire which is already ablaze. This will explode the situation in an already exploding region."

The tape, which is titled "Five Years of the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by Tyrants," couldn't be verified but the AP noted it "the logo of al-Qaida's media wing," for what that's worth. Al-Zawahiri also trashed Iraqi Sunnis who created "Awakening Councils" and joined up with American forces.

More here.

What say you, Hit & Runners? Is A-Z right that U.S. options are all bad? That God is on al Qaeda's side? That Iran is on the march regionally? That the title of this audiotape sounds like a track from Love's Forever Changes? And shouldn't he be asking whether al Qaeda is bleeding to death in Iraq and elsewhere?

No, No, The Net

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:36:00 EST

According to reports in the Iranian press, the Ahmadinejad government is considering a mass Internet outage preceding the general legislative elections in March:

"Shutting down the Internet service will depend on security plans and on the Ministry of Telecommunication," said Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the interior minister, according to Etemad Melli, a daily.
At the same time, a senior election official, Muhammad Javad Mahmoudi, said a shutdown would help ensure that the government had unimpeded Internet service for the election, even though the governments' Internet lines had been upgraded, according to ISNA.
Iran has placed many restrictions on the Internet, but it has never shut down the Internet on such a scale. Several million Iranians follow political news on the Internet, and political parties have their own active Web sites.

I previously blogged about the Iranian crackdown on heavy metal here. Incidentally, Radar Magazine blogged the same item the following day, employing, ummm, very familiar language.

Will "Straits of Hormuz Incident" Be on Schoolchildren's Lips 30 Years From Now?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:29:00 EST

Some complications from the Australian Herald-Sun and USA Today in the "Iran was trying to start a war in the Gulf" story. Upshot: Iran has conflicting video and audio; Navy admits it can't be sure the provocative audio was actually coming from the supposedly suspicious-acting Iranian boats.

Preemptive strike to commenters who like to read more into short posts than they are saying: My linking to these stories does not mean I think they definitively settle the question of what happened or its meaning.

Love Thy Enemy

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:45:00 EST

It's not often that one has the stomach to call on political realists—all too frequently purveyors of foreign policy stalemate and pals of despots worldwide. However, realism was called for last week when American intelligence agencies released a National Intelligence Estimate claiming that Iran had halted work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Even half-hearted assessments of the national interest would have produced more insightful responses to the NIE than the ones that we got.

With everyone focusing on the nuclear issue, few noticed that regardless of whether Iran produces atomic weapons or not, its acrimonious rivalry with the United States in the Middle East is bound to escalate. Given that the U.S. went to war in 1991 to prevent Iraq from imposing its hegemony in the Persian Gulf area, does it make sense to assume that Washington would readily allow a threatening Iran to do what the Iraqis failed to?

There were two types of reactions to the NIE, both inadequate for dealing with the real stakes in American-Iranian hostility throughout the Middle East. The first focused on the fact that President George W. Bush, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, had in recent months amplified their war rhetoric against Iran, even though Bush was told last August by the director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, that Iran's nuclear program "may be suspended." This seemed to contradict an earlier statement by the president that McConnell had told him no such thing.

The second reaction was rather different. With the nuclear threat allegedly on hold, politicians and commentators suddenly began advising the administration to engage Iran in some sort of discussion. Senate majority leader Harry Reid called on Bush to do what President Ronald Reagan had done with the Soviet Union and push for "a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran." Republican senator Chuck Hagel asked the administration to show the same flexibility toward Iran that it had shown toward North Korea. Rand Beers, who served as national security advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign, observed: "Simply put, we have an imminent need for a real dialogue with Iran, not a military confrontation."

It was certainly unsettling that Bush and Cheney were talking about a war with Iran when they knew, or should have known, that their stated justification for war was no longer valid. However, the rush toward advocating dialogue and flexibility was equally incomprehensible.

A dialogue over what? No one seemed particularly clear on that point. Suddenly, it seemed, the problem was not power politics and the thrusts and parries of the U.S.-Iranian quarrel, but the Bush administration's stubborn refusal to be conciliatory. During the 1980s, in the midst of the debate over nuclear missiles in Europe, French President Francois Mitterrand famously declared: "The pacifists are in the West but the missiles are in the East." Of course there were missiles in the West then, just as there are those in Washington now who still favor war against Iran; but it's also undeniable that those wanting to open up to Iran are mostly on the American side, while Iran's leaders continue to relentlessly pursue strategic advantage in their own neighborhood.

The Iranian's are playing three-dimensional chess in the Middle East, while the U.S. is playing with its hankie. American policy in the region suffers from a lack of ideas. The administration's disorientation after the release of the NIE report showed that in the absence of a war option (and an unpersuasive war option at that), the U.S. remains unsure what to do about Iran. But the Democrats are equally at sea. Even administration critic Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council adviser on the Middle East, admitted recently that "[r]egrettably, opposition Democrats are not defining a genuine alternative. Beyond criticism of President Bush's ‘saber rattling,' Democratic presidential candidates offer, for the most part, only vacuous rhetoric about ‘engaging' Iran."

For example, what is the U.S. doing about Iran's alliance with Syria, and their joint patronage of Hamas and Hizbullah? Hamas is dead set on wrecking American efforts to bring about a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and several months ago the movement mounted a successful coup against the Fatah movement in Gaza. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in Damascus, is a frequent visitor to Tehran, and although Syria will send sporadic signals that it is displeased with the Islamist group, this is chaff designed to keep alive the illusion that Syria and Iran are on different wavelengths. Nothing will divide Syria from Iran when the relationship brings so many foreign supplicants to Damascus with offers of concessions to President Bashar Assad, if only he would consider abandoning Iran. Assad takes the concessions, offers none of his own, and yet the visitors still keep coming.

Similarly, Iran and Syria are putting on a "good cop, bad cop" routine in Lebanon. Damascus is steadily re-imposing its hegemony over its smaller neighbor, neutralizing or assassinating those who oppose a Syrian return. Iran is backing Syria up because Hizbullah will benefit. The Shiite group knows that the stabilization of Lebanon under a sovereign government would force it to surrender its weapons; and without weapons Hizbullah would cease to be Hizbullah. Iran needs the party and its arms to sustain its influence in the Levant, as well as to preserve a deterrence capability at Israel's doorstep. Damascus, in turn, needs Hizbullah to intimidate Syria's Lebanese foes. The Iranians are proving almost as instrumental as the Syrians in reversing the gains of the 2005 Cedar Revolution.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to back Lebanon's anti-Syrian March 14 coalition. However, it is increasingly doing so from a distance. The Bush administration has spent much less money than Iran in Lebanon, and has not pressed its wealthier Arab allies to make up for the deficit. In fact it has been remarkably silent as one such ally, Qatar, has played an essential role in bolstering the Assad regime and Hizbullah. Worse, in the run-up to the ongoing crisis over choosing a new Lebanese president, Bush endorsed what would prove to be a disastrous French diplomatic initiative to facilitate an election. The initiative, in practical terms, invited the Syrians back into Lebanese presidential politics, undermining Washington's and Paris' declared aim of defending Lebanese sovereignty.

The Bush administration has also been catatonic in Congress. For example it has done nothing to press for passage of the Syria Accountability and Liberation Act, legislation that would substantially strengthen and widen U.S. sanctions against Syria. The law is blocked in the House Foreign Affairs Committee because of disagreement over wording between the ranking Democrat and Republican members. The reasons for this are mainly domestic and electoral. Yet thanks to parochial politicking, the U.S. government has been denied a valuable stick with which to defend its interests in the Middle East.

So, how does a dialogue look now? Iran would gladly draw the U.S. into a lengthy discussion of everything and nothing, and use this empty gabfest as a smokescreen to advance its agenda. But diplomacy is not an end in itself; to be meaningful it has to achieve specific aims and be based on confidence that both sides seek a mutually advantageous deal. Nothing suggests the Iranians have reached that stage yet.

That's because Iran believes it is winning in the region. The U.S. seems unable to deploy the same array of foreign policy instruments as the Iranians, even if it is vastly more powerful; America's principal Arab allies are anemic, their mostly geriatric regimes illegitimate; and America's attention span abroad often seems so limited that an adversary's favored tactic is to just wait until its officials lose interest and head for the lecture circuit. The Iranians are right, they are winning; at least for the time being.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Iranian Nukes: Maybe Not So Soon After All

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:20:00 EST

A new National Intelligence Estimate just released today concludes that Iran has stopped active efforts at building its own nukes. CNN's report.

"We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely," the report says. A more likely time frame for that production is between 2010 and 2015, it concludes.

The Bush administration doesn't think this means we can rest easy, though:

U.S. National Security adviser Stephen Hadley expressed hope after Monday's announcement, but he said Iran remains a serious threat.
"We have good reason to continue to be concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon even after this most recent National Intelligence Estimate," he told reporters at the White House. "In the words of the NIE, quote, Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons if a decision is made to do so."

The Inter-Press Service reported last month, based on "accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers," that what seems to be this very NIE has actually been ready to go for nearly a year. I'm not 100 percent convinced by that sourcing, but Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly is, and notes:

This NIE was apparently finished a year ago, and its basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House well before that. This means that all the leaks, all the World War III stuff, all the blustering about the IAEA — all of it was approved for public consumption after Cheney/Bush/Rice/etc. knew perfectly well it was mostly baseless.

The National Intelligence Estimate at issue.

The War on Terror, and the Terror in Response to War

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:23:00 EST

Been following Ron Paul around a bit lately, and noting his eminently sensible reliance on basic golden rule thinking when applied to foreign policy: how might we feel if the rest of the world treated us as we treat them?

Well, we know how we feel, as subtly revealed in this Associated Press piece up at military.com, a mostly unremarkable roundup of some of the possibilities and plans for a war with Iran (though I am relieved to hear we're back to only one aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf right now). But note this interesting language in the last sentence after a long discussion about the hows and whats and maybes of us beginning a military assault on Iran, something that is often referred to, I believe, as "war":

The possibility of U.S. military action raises many tough questions, beginning perhaps with the practical issue of whether the United States knows enough about Iran's network of nuclear sites - declared sites as well as possible clandestine ones - to sufficiently set back or destroy their program.
Among other unknowns: Iran's capacity to retaliate by unleashing terrorist strikes against U.S. targets.

You say war, we say terror. You say war, we say terror. Any chance of calling the whole thing off? We'll see.

Is No Nukes Good Nukes in Iran?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:24:00 EDT

Is Iran actually putting together nukes? All sides agree they'd like to, but beyond that it's unclear, reports the AP via the Detroit News:

Vice President Dick Cheney has raised the prospect of "serious consequences" if Iran were found to be working toward developing a nuclear weapon. Last week, the Bush administration announced harsh penalties against the Iranian military and state-owned banking systems in hopes of raising pressure on the world financial system to cut ties with Tehran.

[Atomic Energy Agency International head Mohamed] ElBaradei said he was worried about the growing rhetoric from the U.S., which he noted focused on Iran's alleged intentions to build a nuclear weapon rather than evidence the country was actively doing so. If there is actual evidence, ElBaradei said he would welcome seeing it....
'My fear is that if we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice, we will end up into an abyss. As I said, the Middle East is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the fire," ElBaradei added.

More here.

Petitioning the Government for a Prevention of Grievances

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:31:00 EDT

Don't want a pre-emptive war with Iran? Go sign this petition! See what good it does!

Who's Afraid of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:02:00 EDT

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University yesterday, he did not emerge with the "propaganda victory" that the neocon pundit Bill Kristol assured us he would receive. He didn't seem to be having fun either. Instead, he had to listen while Columbia President Lee Bollinger lambasted him for the terrible state of civil liberties in Iran: the executions, the political prisoners, the persecution of homosexuals. Bollinger also questioned Iran's foreign policy—sometimes skating past the province of the proven, but never beyond the realm of legitimate inquiries—and he challenged the Iranian for suggesting the Holocaust is a "myth." Agence France-Presse called the introduction "a humiliating and public dressing down."

And then, after presenting his point of view, Ahmadinejad faced frequently hostile questions from the audience. Immediately before the Columbia speech, he had spoken via satellite to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where he also had to answer audience questions. Before that he appeared on 60 Minutes, where he had faced still more questions. For a few days in September, the president of a repressive religious regime actually had to engage his critics.

No wonder the hawks were up in arms. For months Kristol and company have been telling us that engaging Iran is a dreadful, futile mistake. When they complained about Columbia's decision to let that country's president speak on campus, they were simply continuing this crippling inability to distinguish conversation from surrender. Maybe they were genuinely afraid that this would be a PR triumph for Ahmadinejad, and maybe they just didn't like the idea of a pause for reflection as they steamroll us to war. Either way, they were wrong.

Bollinger's critics didn't restrict themselves to complaining. The speaker of the New York Assembly, Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), has suggested the state could cut back its assistance to the university to punish it for hosting the Iranian. As it happens, I'd like to see that support slashed anyway, in part because—as Silver's threat demonstrates—such money often comes with strings attached. But what freedom-loving American can help but be repelled at the impulse behind Silver's proposal, this idea that the government should use the power of the purse to shut down a discussion it dislikes? Who can help but be repelled at the implication that Columbia's students can't hold their own in a debate with the president of Iran?

Interviewed by The New York Sun, Silver explained his position. "What makes it more outrageous is the fact that some dean yesterday said he would have invited Adolf Hitler," he said. "It's totally outrageous. This is not a matter of academic freedom. This is a matter of legitimizing people, one who was the perpetrator of the Holocaust and one who denies its existence." I prefer the attitude of the Jewish students who turned out to listen to their Iranian visitor, to ask him questions, and to boo and jeer when they disapproved of what he was saying. If you saw C-Span's abbreviated coverage of the event, you may have noticed the many yarmulkes adorning heads in the audience. I doubt the people who wore them admire Ahmadinejad any more than Silver did. But they apparently understand that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and that even bad speech can be valuable. In response to one query, about the mistreatment of homosexuals in Iran, Ahmadinejad claimed that there simply are no gays in his country: "In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you that we have it." Anyone listening to that lie learned a lot about Iranian society. Ahmadinejad himself may have learned a thing or two from the laughter that swept the room after his answer.

Silver isn't the only politician looking for ways to punish Columbia. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) tried to juice up his bottom-tier presidential campaign by announcing he'd "introduce legislation in Congress to disqualify Columbia University from any future federal support." Another Republican contender, Mitt Romney, grandstanded even more shamelessly, proclaiming that the Iranian shouldn't have received an entry visa in the first place. If you suspected that Silver and Hunter represent just a tiny sliver of the electorate, Romney's statement should give you pause. Romney isn't an ordinary flesh-and-blood candidate, after all; he's a machine calibrated to say whatever is most likely to emerge from a focus group of Republican primary voters.

The most desperate attacks on Columbia have charged the institution with hypocrisy. One argument—Kristol trots it out, and so do John McCain and The Wall Street Journal—faults the school for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak while barring ROTC from campus. The two policies might have been comparable, I guess, if Ahmadinejad had used his time to train the audience for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Others note that the Columbia Political Union just cancelled its plans to have Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrest speak at the university. That might have been damning if the Columbia Political Union had sponsored Ahmadinejad's talk, but the latter was a project of the School of International and Public Affairs, an entirely different organization.

But even if the Political Union had run yesterday's event, so what? The organizers would be hypocrites, sure, but that would prove only that they acted spinelessly when Gilchrest's speech was at stake, not that they acted improperly when inviting the president of Iran.

One more critic—Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League—has called Columbia's decision "a perversion of the concept of freedom of speech," declaring, "There's no requirement, no moral imperative, to give him a platform that he will not give [his opponents] in Tehran." Foxman is right, to an extent. President Ahmadinejad does not have a right to give a lecture at Columbia, and Columbia does not have a duty to let him in. Columbia does not have a right to receive our tax dollars, either, and politicians do not have a duty to subsidize it. If you're a libertarian looking for a loophole, a reason you shouldn't feel obliged to defend the event, it's not hard to find one. The First Amendment is not at issue here.

But free speech is at issue, because this tempest gets to the heart of a key argument for the open marketplace of ideas: the idea that hearing what other people have to say and confronting their ideas is good, and that doing so makes us not weaker but stronger. "This event has nothing whatsoever to do with any rights of the speaker," Bollinger said as he introduced his guest, "but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves."

That is why the petty tyrant who spoke at Columbia emerged bruised instead of beaming. Because the people who posed questions were free to ask those questions, and because they were free to hear his answers. They had an enormous opportunity, and they made the most of it. Only a coward would see such an opening and fear catastrophe.

Jesse Walker is the managing editor of reason.

The Next Iranian Revolution

info@reason.com (Michael J. Totten) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:05:00 EDT

In a green valley nestled between snow-capped peaks in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq is an armed camp of revolutionaries preparing to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. Men with automatic weapons stand watch on the roofs of the houses. Party flags snap in the wind. Radio and satellite TV stations beam illegal news, commentary, and music into homes and government offices across the border.

The compound resembles a small town more than a base, with corner stores, a bakery, and a makeshift hospital stocked with counterfeit medicine. From there the rebels can see for miles around and get a straight-shot view toward Iran, the land they call home. They call themselves Komala, which means simply “Association.”

Abdulla Mohtadi, the Komala Party’s secretary general, and Abu Baker Modarresi, a member of the party’s political bureau, hosted me in their meeting house. Sofas and chairs lined the walls, as is typical in Middle Eastern salons. Fresh fruit was provided in large bowls. A houseboy served thick Turkish coffee in shot glasses.

Both men started their revolutionary careers decades ago, when the tyrannical Shah Reza Pahlavi still ruled Iran. “We were a leftist organization,” Mohtadi said, speaking softly with an almost flawless British accent. “It was the ’60s and ’70s. It was a struggle against the Shah, against oppression, dictatorship, for social justice, and against—the United States.” He seemed slightly embarrassed by this. “Sorry,” he said.

I told him not to worry, that I hadn’t expected anything else. The U.S. government had backed the dictatorship he fought to destroy. Pro-American politics had not been an option.

The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, arrested Mohtadi and his closest comrades. He suffered three years of confinement and torture in the dictator’s dungeons. Modarresi quietly sipped his coffee while Mohtadi explained this to me, interrupting only to say that he too was arrested and tortured, and jailed for four years. Both were later released. And both took part in the 1979 revolution that brought down the state.

The even more tyrannical Ayatollah Khomeini replaced Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian Revolution, like so many others before it, devoured its children. It had been broad-based and popular at the beginning: Liberals allied with leftists, and leftists allied with Islamists. It didn’t seem like a recipe for fascism, but that’s what they got. The Islamists came out on top and smashed the liberals and leftists.

Mohtadi is still a critic of the United States, though he is much milder about it today. “There has been lots of oppression,” he said, “and killings and torture and expelling people from their land and sending them to internal exile in Iran and shelling the cities and all kinds of oppression. The problem with the policy of the United States is that for a long time they neglected the violations of human rights in Iran. Also the European governments, the European countries, they didn’t say anything about the atrocities going on in Iran. They called it a critical dialogue, but it was not a critical dialogue. It was lucrative trade with Iran.”

Komala vs. Komala
Don’t confuse the Komala Party with the Komala Party. Iraqi Kurdistan hosts two exiled leftist parties from Iranian Kurdistan, both with the same name, the same (red) flag, and the same founder. Both parties have armed camps and military wings. Both built their compounds on the same road outside the city of Suleimaniya. They’re right next to each other, in fact. Stand in the right place, and you can see one from the other. The difference is that one is liberal and the other is communist.

I didn’t know there were two until I set up an appointment to meet Mohtadi, of the liberal Komala Party, and wound up inside the communist camp, unannounced. The communists were good sports about my mistake. They granted me interviews, introduced me to Secretary General Hassan Rahman Panah, and fed me lunch. They gave me the grand tour. They didn’t tell me I was at the wrong compound. That news came from Modarresi, when he called to ask why I hadn’t shown up.

On the surface, the two parties are more confusingly interchangeable than the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mohtadi says Life of Brian is one of his favorite movies.

Today’s liberal Komala Party members belonged to the communist Komala Party and the larger Iranian Communist Party until they bitterly divorced in the 1980s.

“They were hard left, to the point of Maoist, at one point,” says Andrew Apostolou, a Brookings Institution historian who specializes in the region and knows Komala well. “We took part in the Communist Party of Iran,” Mohtadi said, “but after some years we realized it was a mistake. We criticized that and split from them. It took some years, of course. It was not just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“You split with them over what, precisely?” I said.

“Over so many things,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment. “They have lost contact with the realities of the society. They have no sympathy for the democratic movement in Iran. We think the time for that kind of left is over.” Mohtadi disagrees with Iran’s communists on every point that matters: human rights, democracy, economics, the appropriate use of violence, the proper stance toward the West. Komala’s economic views are still leftist, like those of small-s “socialists” in Europe, but Mohtadi flatly rejects systems like Cuba’s. “I know they have social achievements in health care and education and all that,” he said. “But in terms of political oppression and cult of personality, that’s outdated. It’s not acceptable for a modern civil society.”

For his part, Panah of the communist Komala said dismissively of his wayward comrades, “We do not speak to each other.”

Even in Iraq and Iran, left-wing parties fracture and withdraw into mutually loathing camps. The radicals always denounce the moderates as heretics, sellouts, “capitalist roaders,” neoconservatives.

Both Komala compounds were shelled and gassed with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein. Saddam did his worst to erase the Kurds of Iraq from the face of the earth. Komala’s members came from Iran, and they opposed the Islamic Republic just as he did. But they were still Kurds.

Komala was defenseless. Komala needed an army, not only to fight the Islamic Republic but to defend itself in Iraq. So it built one.

Those Who Face Death
The Iraqi Kurds called their guerrilla movement against Saddam Hussein the Peshmerga—“Those Who Face Death.” The contemporary Kurds’ professional army, which functions as a constitutionally sanctioned regional guard in the Kurdish autonomous region, is also called the Peshmerga. And the liberal Komala calls its warriors the same thing. They protect the base from Iranian infiltrators and death squads, and they cross the border into Iran during uprisings. “When the time comes we can organize not hundreds but thousands of Peshmergas,” Mohtadi said. “It is very easy.”

The last major Iranian Kurdish uprising was in 2005. It failed to topple the state, but it was huge and made headlines all over the world. “It swept many cities and towns and even villages,” Mohtadi said. “It started from Mahabad. Young people were brutally killed by the authorities, tortured and then killed.”

One of the victims, Shwane Qadiri, belonged to the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan, which recently changed its name to the Kurdistan Freedom Party. “He was a member of our party,” says party spokesman Zagros Yazdanpanah. “After that, all of Iranian Kurdistan rose up. Everywhere in all cities there were demonstrations against the Iranian regime. Our people inside are organized. Our people are in hiding; it is very dangerous.”

“There was an uprising in Mahabad and violent clashes between people and the authorities,” Mohtadi added. “That incident was spontaneous. There was no political party behind it. And from Mahabad, spreading it to other cities, we were behind it. We were the most influential political party that organized most of the demonstrations. We even organized its date and its time.”

Yazdanpanah says Komala shouldn’t take all the credit—his party organized demonstrations too, as did others—but he agrees that Komala’s role was substantial. It sent in its fighters, hoping to seize control of parts of Iran from the regime. The Revolutionary Guards and the police were too much for them, though, and they later had to return to Iraq.

Nadir Dawladi Abadi, a member of Komala’s Political Bureau, gave me a tour of the training camp where Peshmergas are made. We walked unannounced into a classroom where new recruits studied weapons. Everyone in the room stood up at once and greeted us formally. They did not return to their chairs until I awkwardly gestured for them to sit. I felt like an intruder, but they ignored me as the lecture continued.

To my surprise, there were women there. None wore a hijab, the Islamic head scarf, over her hair, which is required by law in Iran. The students sat in plastic chairs with notebooks and machine guns in their laps. “They are studying RPGs [rocket propelled grenades],” Abadi whispered to me.

Modarresi later told me new recruits also study what he calls “the Komala ideology.” The red Komala star, a branding remnant from the communist days, loomed like a baleful eye on the wall over the whiteboard. The idea of a red star and “ideological instruction” made me wince. Modarresi put me at ease. They aren’t reading Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, he said. They’re learning about democracy, human rights, pluralism, and civics, concepts that are not taught in schools by the Islamic Republic. I can’t confirm Komala’s classroom curriculum, but the party members are well-known locally for being ex-communists, despite their continued use of the red flag and star.

“What kinds of weapons do they learn how to use in their training?” I asked Abadi.

“Kalashnikovs, AK-47s, sniper rifles, grenades, RPGs, and anti-aircraft guns,” he said.

“Can you tell me how many Peshmergas you have here?” I said.

Abadi laughed, shook his head, and laughed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know the answer to that.”

We walked the grounds. Several members of the party joined us so they could listen in. I snapped pictures of everyone with my Nikon. Then, unexpectedly, they all wanted pictures of me. Out came cell phone cameras and giddy smiles. I posed with them for 10 minutes. Apparently, they didn’t receive many visitors from the West.

“How much longer do you think the Iranian regime will survive?” I asked Abadi after they put their cameras away.

“Ask your government,” he said and chuckled. Big laughs all around.

“What would you think if the United States invaded Iran?” I said.

“There are many points of view about that,” Abadi said. “But in general the people of Iran are happy to see that.”

“A war?” I said. “Really?”

“Invasion, yes,” he said. “The people of Iran are thinking politically. The people have had many bad experiences since the 1979 revolution. They want the American people to topple the regime, not to occupy the land.”

He did not only mean that the Kurds of Iran want a war, as the Kurds of Iraq wanted a war. He also meant most Persians want an invasion.

This is not the official Komala line. “We are not for a military attack by the United States,” Mohtadi said later. “Support the internal opposition against the regime. That’s the best way to change. We are for regime change.”

Abadi’s claim that Iranians as a whole would support an invasion of Iran is a bit dubious. Some would certainly support it. But the regime points to the threat of invasion as an excuse to remain in power, and there is a danger that American intervention would merely drive potential rebels back into the government’s arms. Even among the anti-regime activists, there are many—including Abadi’s boss, Abdulla Mohtadi—who say they want revolution and not an invasion.

The Komala Party’s members, or at least its senior leaders, are among the most experienced armed revolutionaries in the world. They’ve already toppled one Iranian government, badly as it may have turned out for them in the end. As they plot another insurrection, they hope this won’t be a rerun of the last one. “We are for democratic values,” Mohtadi told me. “We are for political freedoms, religious freedoms, secularism, pluralism, federalism, equality of men and women, Kurdish rights, social justice. We are for a good labor law, labor unions. There is an element of the left in our political program.”

They sounded like European-style social democrats. I asked if I could describe them that way. “We won’t be angry,” Modarresi replied with a laugh.

Terror and Liberalism
When are acts of violence against a state justified? What kind of violence is moral, and what kind is not? These are the questions Komala grapples with.

The old-school Komala Party, Hassan Panah’s communist group down the road, thinks any act of violence against an oppressive state is justified, including attacks on civilians who live in and visit the country. For the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla militia waging a terrorist war in Eastern Turkey, Turkish soldiers, cops, and civilians are legitimate targets. So are Kurdish civilians opposed to the PKK’s program and methods. So are foreign tourists who visit the Turkish beaches. Recently the PKK opened a branch in Iran, where it pretends to be something else. There it calls itself the Party of Free Youths in Kurdistan, or PJAK. Panah’s Komala supports both the PKK and PJAK.

An ancient Middle Eastern saying holds that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It may seem Panah’s party subscribes to this maxim, despite the fact that its Islamist “friends” in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 liquidated the left when they came to power. But Panah won’t even speak to Abdulla Mohtadi or anyone else in the liberal Komala Party. And Panah’s party, like Mohtadi’s, is heavily armed. The communists holed up in their own lonely compound are, if not terrorists themselves, at least armed supporters of terrorists. At the end of the day,
this may be a distinction without much difference.

Running an ethically sound revolution requires hard moral as well as political work, and Mohtadi will have none of Panah’s apologetics for scoundrels, even if it means the Islamic Republic will last longer. “They are very fanatic in their nationalism,” he said of the PKK. “They are very undemocratic in nature. They have no principles, no friendship, no contracts, no values. In the name of the Kurdish movement, they eliminate everybody.”

Mohtadi and his party also stand foursquare against the Iranian Mujahideen Khalq, a small and ideologically bizarre armed group that fuses Marxism, Islamism, Iranian nationalism, and a personality cult around its leaders. They appear on most country’s lists of terrorist organizations, including those of both Iran and the United States. Mohtadi knows all too well what happens to revolutions with totalitarians in them. Even his old comrade Panah knew that when they worked together in the 1970s.

“We were not against revolution,” Mohtadi said. “We were not against overthrowing the regime of the Shah. What we were against was violence by small groups of guerrillas who were separated from the mass movement. There were two different groups, religious and secular leftist guerrilla groups, who were influential at that time. People thought they were the way out of the dictatorship. Many, many intellectuals and students and political activists joined them. But we wrote different pamphlets criticizing their methods.”

These aren’t academic questions in the Middle East. Opposing this or that faction or group isn’t about political posturing, as it often is in the West. Dilemmas over the use of force don’t apply strictly to the struggle inside Iran. The Islamic Republic sends spies into Iraq. Gun fights between government agents and party members have broken out on the roads in the province. Occasionally, Mohtadi told me, his people awkwardly run across Tehran’s men in the city markets of Iraqi Kurdistan’s northeastern city of Suleimaniya. There they can pretend they didn’t see or don’t know each other.

Most worrying is when the regime’s secret police sneak into the compound.

Nadir Abadi showed me to a small one-room building on the Peshmerga training grounds. Three men lounging inside on the floor stood up to greet us. “These people recently came out of Iran,” he said. “They want to become Peshmergas. We have to investigate them first, so they have to stay here two or three months. After their identities are cleared, they will join the training courses.”

“I’m curious how you investigate them,” I said, “but I suppose you can’t tell me.”

“We have contacts with underground activists who do such kind of things,” he said. “We can learn about them from them. It’s not that complex.”

But it does take several months. And what, I asked, do they do when they catch someone they think is a spy?

“We don’t have jails here,” Abadi said. “We thought about executing them. But we don’t want to do that. So we make them sign a paper and confess their guilt and promise not to do it again. Then we send them back to Iran.”

It may sound like a weak response in such a tough neighborhood, assuming the claim is true. But unless the regime has figured out a way to evade Komala’s own intelligence agents, the seemingly weak response apparently works. It has been years now, Abadi said, since they caught anyone on site working for the Islamic Republic.

Some armed political parties in the region sucker gullible reporters into portraying them as more moderate and reasonable than they really are. A member of Hezbollah’s political bureau tried it with me before their media relations department threatened and blacklisted me. But Brookings’ Apostolou doesn’t think the party is playing the fake moderate game. “They are not linked to the PKK, PJAK, or the Mujahideen Khalq,” he told me.

“We were against the guerrilla warfare movement that swept the world in the 1970s,” Mohtadi said. “We had our theories against that. We believed in political work, raising awareness, organizing people.”

Komala’s model of the ideal guerrilla movement is Iraq’s Kurdish Peshmerga. These men (and, yes, women) were and are a genuine “people’s army” backed almost unanimously by civilians. (The PKK, meanwhile, car bombs its Kurdish opponents.) The Peshmerga fought honorably against Saddam Hussein without resorting to the terrorism and authoritarianism that corrupt so many Middle Eastern militants of both the left and the right.

Komala’s stance on erstwhile enemies such as the United States also is—and was—complex and cautious. Mohtadi bristled when I off-handedly, without meaning offense, referred to the party’s previous position as anti-American. “We were not anti-American,” he said. “We were against the policies of the United States at that time.”

I’ve heard this sort of thing before from people who don’t really mean it. At least a dozen Lebanese supporters of Hezbollah have told me, a tad unconvincingly, that their “Death to America” slogan expresses merely a policy disagreement with the United States. There may be a small point in there somewhere. The Arabic language is flush with hyperbole. But if the U.S. government opened sessions of Congress by shouting “Death to Hezbollah” or, worse, “Death to Lebanon,” I doubt Hezbollah would take it in stride.

Mohtadi, though, isn’t made of Hezbollah material. Instead of railing against the United States and waging war on its allies in the region, he recently met with State Department officials and asked for help from the American government. “We are not asking for an invasion,” he told Eli Lake at The New York Sun in April. “We are saying that helping Iranian parties fight for democracy and regime change is good for us and good for America.”

Mohtadi and Modarresi asked me to stay for dinner. Several other political bureau members joined us at the table. Servants brought us baked chicken, barbecued lamb, steamed rice, an enormous stuffed fish from one of Kurdistan’s lakes, and four bottles of red wine from Lebanon.

The 66 hostages seized from the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979 finally came up in conversation. “We were against that from the very beginning,” Mohtadi said. I half expected him to bang his fist on the table. Suddenly his soothing demeanor was gone. Mention of the hostage episode had riled him up. He may have been politically anti-American when the embassy workers were taken, but he says that act of anti-Americanism gravely violated his own standards of conduct.

Besides, the United States now is a potential if not actual ally in Mohtadi’s struggle against the Islamic Republic. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Mohtadi’s list of ideological foes has changed over time. Today his enemies are precisely those with whom he aligned himself during the battle against the Shah: the totalitarian left and the Islamist right.

Iran Isn’t Iraq
More encouraging than Komala’s moderation and political evolution is its plausible claim—backed up by most Iranian activists, expatriates, and dissidents—that Iranian society as a whole is far more sensible and mature than it was in 1979, at least at the level below the state, on the street. The aftermath of an Iranian revolution, Mohtadi said, will not resemble the postwar occupation of Iraq with its civil war, insurgency, kidnappings, and car bombs.

“We have an internal opposition,” he said. “We have an internal movement against the regime. Women were warned not to celebrate 8 March, Women’s Day. They did. There are demonstrations in Iran. There are movements in Iran. You have the intellectuals, the political activists, the human rights activists, then the Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, different nationalities. There is a movement in Iran, unlike in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, where you had Kurds and nobody else.” (Iraq’s Shia did rise up against Saddam in 1991, but they had been quiet since Baghdad’s brutal response to that insurrection.) “It’s not like that in Iran.”

Iran’s opposition undoubtedly has more breadth and maturity than Iraq’s did under Saddam Hussein. And if Iran’s government falls to a mass revolution rooted in civil society instead of an outside invasion, post-regime chaos is less likely—assuming the various ethnic groups can hold it together.

Iran is commonly thought of as Persian, but ethnic Persians make up only 51 percent of the population. Twenty-five percent are Turkish Azeris, 10 percent are Kurds, and smaller numbers are Baluchis and Arabs. How are Iran’s relations among its various “nationalities”? “Much better than the relations between Kurds and Arabs” in Iraq and Syria, Mohtadi said. “Historically Persians and Kurds have been, as people say, cousins. Culturally they are closer to each other than Kurds and Arabs, who have almost nothing in common.”

“The Iranian people and the Iranian Kurds are more developed,” he continued. “They are more cultured; they are more organized. Even the Iraqi Kurds admit that culturally [Iranian Kurds] are higher and more developed economically. The credit doesn’t go to the Islamic Republic. For a long time Iran has been a civilization. Iraq’s tribal and medieval culture, the brutality, the lawlessness, revenge—Iraq was very primitive and still is, apart from Kurdistan. You look at it, and you become astonished at how undeveloped politically they are.”

He has a point. Iraqi Kurds built the only safe, prosperous, and politically moderate place in Iraq, yet they admire the Iranians (though not their government). The Iraqi Kurdish city of Suleimaniya is far more liberal and open, and noticeably less backward and tribal, than the Iraqi Kurdish cities of Erbil and Dohuk. This, according to people who live there, is partly due to Suleimaniya’s proximity to Iran and the centuries-long liberalizing effect Iranian Persians and Kurds have had on their culture.

Mohtadi could be wrong. Maybe he’s talking about a minority that looks to him like a majority. Perhaps his analysis is slightly deceitful, a little self-serving. These things happen. We know how inaccurate Ahmed Chalabi’s rosy predictions about post-Saddam Iraq turned out to be. There is no way to know for certain until the Islamic Republic is gone. If Mohtadi does turn out to be wrong, though, he won’t be alone. Most opposition groups inside and outside Iran claim the Iranian people—Persians, Kurds, and Azeris alike—are far more prepared than Iraqis for civil, democratic politics.

What they don’t know—what no one can know, and what may in the end matter most—is how much damage a fanatical minority can do in Iran after it’s thrown out of power. It may not matter if most Iranians want a normal life in a quiet country. Most Iraqis are not insurgents, but the insurgency rages on.

We can look, though, at the behavior of the ruling fanatics today. As oppressive as the Iranian government is, it’s an enlightened model of restraint compared with Saddam’s regime in Iraq.
Saddam destroyed the city of Halabja with air strikes, artillery, chemical weapons, and napalm. He wiped out 95 percent of the villages in northern Iraq. He drained the marshes in southern Iraq and chopped down the forests of Kurdistan. He threw dissidents into industrial shredders and acid baths. The most mundane things were banned: cell phones, maps, even weather reports. The Mukhabarat, his secret police, arrested anyone who so much as looked at one of his palaces. Iraq was the North Korea of the Middle East.

Iran is harsh, but it isn’t quite that bad. Opposition to the regime is widespread, deep, and open—an unthinkable situation in Saddam’s Iraq. It’s impossible for the Iranian government to crack down on everyone. The police don’t even try anymore.

“You can complain about the government,” Mohtadi said. “You can insult them. But America is a red line. Khomeini himself is a red line. The Israelis are a red line, absolutely.” Iranians can’t buck the party line on certain topics, but they are brave enough, or just barely free enough, to protest the government to its face. “When [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad spoke to students,” Mohtadi pointed out, “hundreds of students stood up and called him a fascist and burned his picture.”

Iran’s Genocide of Islam
Sealing the rugged Iran-Iraq border is all but impossible in the north, where like-minded Kurds live on both sides of it. People, as well as goods, cross every hour. Alcohol is smuggled into Iran. Gasoline and drugs are smuggled out. Komala’s location in the area makes it the perfect place for a vast, sprawling safe house. Activists, underground party members, and dissidents from Iran—the Persian heartland as well as from Iranian Kurdistan—slip through the mountains to visit every day.

I’ve stood on the border myself and contemplated walking undetected into Iran. Komala leaders even offered to take me across and embed me themselves. “We can get you inside Iran and leave you for weeks, if you want, among our supporters and among our people,” Mohtadi said. “It is very easy.”

If I were caught in Iran without a visa or an entry stamp in my passport, I would almost surely be jailed as a spy. Tempting as the offer was, I had to pass. Anyway, I could speak to Iranian dissidents, if not necessarily ordinary Iranians, in the Komala camp just as easily as I could have inside Iran. As it happened, a famous Persian writer and dissident had arrived there just before I did.

Kianoosh Sanjari is a member of the United Student Front in Tehran. At 23, he has been imprisoned and tortured many times. His last arrest was on October 7, 2006, after he wrote about clashes between the Revolutionary Guards and supporters of the liberal cleric Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi. Charged with “acting against state security” and “propaganda against the system,” he was released on $100,000 bail last December. Some months later, he fled to Iraq and moved to the Komala camp.

Unlike most Iranian visitors who use Komala as a safe house, Sanjari didn’t bother remaining anonymous. He told me his real name and said I could publish his picture. If you can read Farsi, you can read his blog at ks61.blogspot.com. “I’m just now coming out of Iran,” he said. “It’s a hell there. I know the sufferings. I am inclined to accept any tactic that helps overthrow this regime.”

“Does that include an American invasion of Iran?” I asked.

“Maybe intellectuals who just talk about things are not in favor of that kind of military attack,” he said. “But I have spoken to people in taxis, in public places. They are praying for an external outside power to do something for them and get rid of the mullahs. Personally, it’s not acceptable for me if the United States crosses the Iranian border. I like the independence of Iran and respect the independence of my country. But my generation doesn’t care about this.”

Sanjari has fierce and intimidating eyes, the eyes not of a fanatic but of a deadly serious person who is not to be messed with. He spoke slowly and with great force. “They repress people in the name of religion,” he said. “They torture people in the name of religion. They kill people in the name of religion. The young generation now wants to distance themselves from religion itself.”

Islamists seem to fail wherever they succeed. Perhaps Islamic law looks good on paper to Muslims who live in oppressive secular states, but few seem to think so after they actually have to put up with it.

More than 100,000 Algerians were killed during the 1990s in a horrific civil war between religious insurgents and the secular police state. As a consequence, Islamists are more hated now in Algeria than at any time since they rose up. Al Qaeda is trying to reignite the war there, and it is failing spectacularly.

Iraqis are turning against Al Qaeda faster and harder than Iranians turned against the Islamic Republic. Harsh as the Islamic Republic may be, Al Qaeda is worse by an order of magnitude. Its now infamous warnings to street vendors in Iraq’s Anbar Province not to place cucumbers next to tomatoes in the market because the vegetables are “different genders” is one of myriad reasons why most Sunni Arab tribes in that region recently flipped to the side of the hated Americans.

Islamist law is so widely detested and flouted in Iran that it’s a wonder the regime even bothers to keep up the pretense. In June 2005 Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair that every person he visited there, with the exception of one single imam, offered him alcohol, which is banned.

Everyone I met at the Komala compound said the Iranian regime itself wallows deep in the post-ideological torpor that inevitably follows radical revolutions. Except for the most fanatic officials, the government cares only about money and power. “Followers of the regime are not ideological anymore,” Sanjari said. “They are bribed by the government. They will no longer support it in the case that it is overthrown. Even among the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guards, there are so many people dissatisfied with the policies of the regime. Fortunately there aren’t religious conflicts between Shias, Sunnis, and different nationalities.”

Mohtadi concurred. “The next revolution and government will be explicitly anti-religious,” he said.

The Iranian writer Reza Zarabi says the regime has all but destroyed religion itself. “The name Iran, which used to be equated with such things as luxury, fine wine, and the arts, has become synonymous with terrorism,” he wrote. “When the Islamic Republic government of Iran finally meets its demise, they will have many symbols and slogans as testaments of their rule, yet the most profound will be their genocide of Islam, the black stain that they have put on this faith for many generations to come.”

It’s certainly possible to be overoptimistic. Iranian dissidents have been predicting an imminent revolution for several years running. Michael Hirsh wrote recently in Newsweek that women in Tehran have “gone defiantly chic” in style and that the men are looking “less and less menacing and more and more metrosexual,” which makes the place sound more like freewheeling Beirut than an Islamist theocracy. But the state, he added, could still endure for some time. “It is an old, familiar umbrella of oppression that now stays just distant enough to be tolerated, even if it is little loved,” he wrote. “The success of this oppressive but subtly effective system should give the regime-change advocates in Washington some pause.”

Whom to believe? Hirsh’s analysis has been the correct one so far, but Iran is notoriously unpredictable even for those who are supposed to be experts. The 1979 Revolution shocked even CIA agents who lived in Iran while it was brewing. They insisted the Shah was firmly entrenched and could not possibly fall.

‘Developments in Iran Aren’t Controllable’
The Middle East is so rife with conflict, factions, murky alliances, foreign interventions, multisided civil wars, and wild-card variables that trying to predict its future is like trying to forecast the weather on a particular day three years in advance. There’s a reason the phrase shifting sands has become a cliché.

If the Islamic Republic is overthrown, almost anything might happen. Iran could become a modern liberal democracy, as most Eastern European states did after the fall of the Soviet Empire. It could revert to a milder form of authoritarian rule, as Russia has. It could, like Iraq, face chronic instability and insurgent attacks. Or its various “nationalities” could tear the country to pieces and go the way of the Yugoslavs. Optimists like Sanjari and Mohtadi may have a better sense of what to expect than those of us in the West, but still they do not know.

The only thing that seems likely is that a showdown of some kind is coming, either between factions in Iran or between Iran and the rest of the world. Predictions of the regime’s imminent demise have been staples of Iranian expat and activist discourse for years, so it’s hard to take the latest predictions seriously. But authoritarian regimes increasingly seem to have limited shelf lives. As Francis Fukuyama’s flawed but compelling book The End of History points out, there has been a worldwide explosion of liberal democracies since the 18th century, from three in 1790 to 36 in 1960 to 61 in 1990. (In 2006 Freedom House classified 148 nations as free or partly free.) History isn’t over and never will be, but it hasn’t been kind to dictatorships lately.

The Iranian state is soft and vulnerable compared with the worst abusers out there, and it constantly faces resistance from citizens. Something will give.

“Movements are taking shape in Iran,” Sanjari said. “The Iranian regime confronts the whole world with its policies. Political developments are very rapid now. Developments in Iran aren’t controllable. I hope the Iranian people overthrow this regime with no or few sacrifices. But that is a dream.”

Michael J. Totten is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Beirut’s Daily Star, L.A. Weekly, Time, and the Australian edition of Newsweek. The Week magazine named him Blogger of the Year in 2006 for his dispatches from the Middle East.