Author: admin

Ramazani: “Bridging the Divides”

** Updates posted below **
As regular justworldnews readers will recognize, Helena and I have presented and commented on numerous essays here by R.K. – “Ruhi” – Ramazani. Here’s one on Jefferson & Iraq, another on “Making Gulf Security Durable,” and this one on why massive arms sales are not the answer. Tomorrow, he faces a complex heart surgery.
On the eve of this potential life crossroad, the University of Virginia, via UVA Today on-line, published a multimedia tribute to Professor Ramazani’s generous service to students, the University, and to the cause of “understanding” between Americans and peoples of the Middle East.
I especially like Professor William Quandt’s comment at the essay end:

“One of Ruhi’s great hopes has been that he could personally help bridge the divide between the country of his birth, Iran, and the country where has lived for most of his adult life, the United States,” said William B. Quandt, the Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs and an expert on the Middle East. “It remains to be seen whether Ruhi’s hope for reconciliation between the two countries he knows best will take place, but if and when it does, he will have played an important role behind the scenes.”

Several years ago, I published a biographical sketch of how Ramazani’s scholarship has compelling echoes in his own life journey. I hope to have it available on line shortly. I’m also in the early stages of a project to “digitize” the best of his half century of writings for ready access to all via the web.
The UVA Today item includes marvelous clips from a recent interview with “the” Professor himself. (look for the link near the top right) In addition to the quotes on what the University has meant to him, about America’s fixation with “fixing” things, and his ending optimism about the “oneness of humankind,” do enjoy the breathtaking scenery behind him. Warms the heart.
Let’s send our good thoughts, wishes, and prayers for his surgery and speedy recovery. We can endeavor to emulate the bridgebuilder; but not replace him.
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Update as of Sept. 26h, 5:00 p.m. est: Via Ruhi’s family, we are greatly encouragedby the good reports from the outstanding University of Virginia heart surgeons. Ruhi has pulled through the surgery, with even a few positive surprises. Thank you Dr. Kron!
Ruhi, enjoy your “vacation….” :-} We – and the world – still need you.

An Iranian Schindler’s List: “Zero Degree Turn”

Remember the controversy over the current Iranian President’s inflammatory questioning of the Holocaust, at one point doubting its extent, at other moments playing up old regional wounds, asking why the Mideast had to “pay” for Europe’s sins? Iran’s image has taken a severe beating as a result of such rhetoric.
Ironically, Iranian state television since April has been showing an extraordinary series, entitled “Zero Degree Turn.” The most expensive production in Iranian TV history, the government approved and funded program sympathetically portrays the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, and depicts an Iranian embassy employee in Paris as a hero who helps his Jewish love and her family flee.
The intriguing series has been a smash hit inside Iran. It’s also gaining an audience internationally, via satellite and net re-broadcasts. Here’s a ten minute sample, with English sub-titles, on YouTube.
For an overview of the series, see Sunday’s AP report. Among Israeli reviews, here’s an early skeptical Ha’aretz report in June. Ynet ran this more upbeat assessment just last week. Ynet draws from an interesting interview of the series producer, Hassan Fatthi, in The Wall Street Journal..
Some may object to Fatthi’s comment that, “The murder of innocent Jews during World War II is just as despicable, sad and shocking as the killing of innocent Palestinian women and children by racist Zionist soldiers.” Yet even David Horovitz in the Jerusalem Post is more impressed by the fact that,

“Monday night after Monday night across Iran, Fatthi is broadcasting an unmistakable challenge to his own president’s efforts at historical revisionism. State TV is essentially telling Ahmadinejad to shut up.”

While the show’s central love story is fictional, Fatthi’s inspiration for his series is true, of an Iranian diplomat in Paris during WWII, Abdol Hussein Sardari, who “saved over a thousand European Jews by forging Iranian passports and claiming they belonged to an Iranian tribe.”
Move over Cyrus.
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I don’t have the time to highlight these reports and comment. In the next few days, I’m finishing an essay about the previous Iranian President’s critically important reformist legacy, one that Iran doubters dismiss too readily. Anybody else miss Khatami’s “Dialogue Among Civilizations?”
Funny thing, just as I’m crossing the “T’s,” this report appears in today’s Financial Times: “Khatami Plots a Comeback.”
If “they” let him run in 2009, my sense of the Iranian landscape (at least as of today) is that he’d win in a landslide. Imagine, we could have a second chance at a Khatami-Clinton Summit.

“Rick Warren should be in jail”

“Rick Warren should be in jail.” So should Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Robert H. Schuller, and perhaps even…. Helena Cobban. :-}
I’m referring, if you haven’t guessed, to prison libraries and to the NYTimes report on new Federal Prison guidelines for libraries, specifically their sections on faith.
Kudos to Sojourners and “Sojo mail” for the catchy, if purposeful, headline about Mr. Warren. From their e-mail today:

Imagine walking into your local library, planning to read a theologian such as Reinhold Niebuhr or Karl Barth, or a popular inspirational work, such as Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life or Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
But instead of finding such important and popular titles, you discover that the religion section has been decimated – stripped of any book that did not appear on a government-approved list.
That’s exactly what’s happening right now to inmates in federal prisons under a Bush Administration policy. As The New York Times put it, “chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.”

Imagine, the Federal Prisons have labored to compile lists of approved books on faith; those not on the list get pulled or blocked. The specific criteria and the actual approved lists are not open for public review; this is, after all, the Bush-Cheney Administration.
Here’s a Sojo link for a suggested protest letter to the Prisons’ Director.
So how did the Bush Administration, reputed for faith-based approaches to social problems, come up with this bizarre policy? Maybe it comes from the “Feith-based” neoconservative view of the world — as in, “it’s all about national security.” According then to the “Stardardized Chapel Library Project,” we prevent prisoners from accessing anything that would “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.” As claimed by the Federal Prisons spokesperson quoted in the Times,

“We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

Just who, we wonder, determines what religious materials are “reliable teachings?” What’s meant by “radicalize,” or “discrimination?” Should we prohibit a book that says there’s only one way to be accepted by God? Wouldn’t that be “discriminating” against others who pointed to another “path?” One would think, this is absurd. Or as the Mark Early of Prison Fellowship puts it,

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer…. There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

Meanwhile, back to the front lines in Iraq – and their religious freedoms – consider this allegation that some US soldiers are being compelled to participate in Christian services. Perhaps there’s a “devil” or two in the details here, as I find it hard to believe that the Pentagon, much less Secretary Gates, would knowingly mandate the practice of any religion by soldiers.
Yet as we’ve noted here before, some “dispensationalist” Christian-zionist groups still view Iraq as a “crusade” for the spread of Christianity. It’s advance will bring on the rapture, Armageddon, the return & reign of Christ, etc. etc. See, for example, Max Blumenthal’s report on “Operation Straight Up” a group that operates with the Pentagon’s “blessing” and proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military, including with inflammatory apocalyptic video games.
In the judgment of Mikey Weinstein, a former Reagan Administration White House,

“The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized,… Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our military.”

Meanwhile, the US State Department recently issued its annual, heavily politicized report on religious freedom around the world.
No doubt the rest of the world wonders:

“What, pray tell, gives you the standing to show us the way?

And now for the “Right to Drive” Movement

Recently, I waxed airily about the “right to dry” movement and the “answer blowing in the wind.” Can’t resist noting, in the same (ironic) spirit, the budding “right to drive” movement in our erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia.
Nascar dudes, check this out: (from The Independent)

“Women in the only country in the world which still bans women from driving want to put their best foot forward – on the accelerator.
Saudi Arabia’s newly established League of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive Cars plans to deliver a petition to King Abdallah Bin Abd Al-Aziz Al Saud, calling for their “stolen” entitlement of free movement to be restored.
In a statement on the Arab website Aafaq, (note – from Sept. 4th) the women said: “This is a right that was enjoyed by our mothers and grandmothers in complete freedom, through the means of transportation available.”

One wonders what “means” the grandmothers then had ?
By the way, MEMRI ‘s translation of the statement includes this curious statement:

“We Would Like to Remind Everyone That Rights Are Not Given or Earned – They Are Taken”

Taken? I wonder if something here still “got lost in the translation.” (I haven’t yet found the original or an OSC rendering.) Might there be a Jefferson echo here, that rights are “inalienable” — as in God given, but “men” take them away, and now women beseech the men to give them back?
See also yesterday’s Arab News (Jeddah) for further insights into this “social” issue. Legally speaking, “there is no law in the Kingdom that explicitly states that women cannot drive.”
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Side subject:
One might also ponder just where the American publishing houses have been on Saudi women’s issues? And how about that unique literary genre of the American “true story” — the “captivity narrative?” Or are those best-selling formula books reserved just for women in countries currently on the bad guy list? (fill in the blank, Iraq, then Afghanistan, and now Iran….)
Here via jwn, I’ve previously mentioned Farzaneh Milani’s ongoing investigations into this realm of American publishing, that of the “hostage narrative.”
For those who missed it, we also featured (via the delic sidebar) a recent compelling oped on the subject by Susan Faludi, entitled “America’s Guardian Myths.”
If you’re not familiar with what 1675 might have to do with 2001, read it. Hint:

“Our original “war on terrorism” bequeathed us a heritage that haunts our reaction to crises like the one that struck on that crisp, clear morning in the late summer of 2001.”

Another Journalism Scandal – the Debat/ABC case

Item: A “counter-terrorism expert” of dubious credentials has been fabricating reports for leading media organizations. Imagine that.
The “expert” in question is one Alexis Debat, whom the London Times (Murdoch Media) cited as their source for the following screaming headline, “Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran.”

“THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

That is, why bother hitting just narrow targets inside Iran somehow connected to violence against Americans in Iraq? Because we can “calculate” that Iranians will hit back hard with additional assets, then we better pre-emptively strike at the retaliatory capability too. And thus, smash the entire country. (Does this logic have an echo to last summer in Lebanon, 2006?)
One problem for the story, the “expert” source of this revelation stands accused of being a disinformation specialist, one who for years has been embedded with ABC News and Washington’s influential Nixon Center think tank. This no doubt is a fast moving story, and I have my own file of Debat doozies, including a disputed April 3rd ABC report of this year that the US, via Pakistan, was secretly providing support to Baluchi insurgents against Iran.
I’m also recalling a widely cited Debat essay, published in The National Interest, from last December 8th, wherein he argued against the Baker-Hamilton Commission recommendations (“There’s nothing we can offer Iran or Syria that they would be interested in”) and instead cynically argued for “a further empowerment of the Sunni militias….” Why, because “the ensuing chaos… would apply significant pressure on the Shi‘a leadership in Baghdad.” (and somehow result in a Milosevic style Dayton deal.) One wonders if Debat also works for Petraeus.
Debat’s present troubles apparently owe to his penchant for publishing long – and faked – interviews, in France’s Politique Internationale, with major American and international figures, including Alan Greenspan, Colin Powell, Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Kofi Annan, and a recent “scoop” with Presidential Candidate Barrack Obama. Debat’s reputation for fabricating stories supposedly was whispered about, but not publicly exposed until a September 7th report in Rue89 . Debat’s initial denial only made matters worse.
ABC now claims they (quietly) “demanded his resignation” in June (without clarifying when they got it). ABC is also sticking to the lame line that the integrity of their reports was not compromised. The Nixon Center cut Debat loose only after the “Rue89” story. Debat’s reports are now disappearing fast from the net.
For more of the details on the scandal, including a hint that Debat claimed he was a Pentagon contractor, see Laura Rozen’s MoJO blog entry. In “Subject to Debat: What did ABC Know and When Did It Know It?,” Rozen observes,

“Overall, the picture of Debat that emerges from these interviews is of a smart, ambitious and cunning operator who would claim to be getting text messages from Middle Eastern intelligence operatives while at meetings with Ross and others at ABC, with tips that seemed too good to be true (which some colleagues believe were bogus), yet were used as “exclusives.”

I suspect there’s more to it than just “cunning” ambition; this is ambition with a neoconservative-style agenda. Rozen also raises key questions about ABC’s internal handling of Debat “scoops” and its present investigation. That is, will Brian Ross’s now tainted “investigative unit” be tasked with investigating itself? (For example, will it touch that Valentines’ Day 2003 story about Udai Hussein being more brutal than his father – the one that cited Debat and was part of media blitz to justify invading Iraq?) Lastly, “enquiring minds will want to know” if ABC will drop the Cheney-like insistence that, “it was confident that all of Debat’s reports for ABC had been vetted and multiple sourced and were standing up to scrutiny.”
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Added note: In this excellent “attytood” comment, Will Bunch of The Daily News points out a “neoconservative” link to Politique Internationale – the French journal that long posted Debat’s fabricated interviews. (The journal’s recent claims that they didn’t know how “crazy” Debat was are, on the face of them, absurd. How many complaints did they get over how many years?) Turns out no less than the infamous Amir Taheri has been an editor at PI from around 2001 until recently. Remember Taheri ? Top “star” in Mdme Benador’s stable of neoconservative propagandists, Taheri was the author of the May 2006 “Yellow Stars for Iranian Jews” disinfo fabrication.
Birds of a feather flock together.

A 9/11 Blessing

(This is Scott writing)
For the past six years, I haven’t had any birthdays. 9/11’s come and go – mostly go. It just hasn’t seemed right to celebrate anything on a day when every American will remember the searing horrors of six years ago.
Lately, I’ve been reminded anew of life’s fragility. An admired Professor recently lost her husband of many decades. Then a brilliant friend lost precious two-year-old son Jude after a tragic pool accident. He and his family now head back to Lebanon, where ironically, I pray they can find peace and “home.” My own long-time mentor is facing a serious heart surgery soon; he has too many much needed books, from Jefferson to Iran, yet to write!
Yet I met a sweet little angel just a few hours ago who already has changed my outlook on life, and 9/11 in particular. Her name is Jessica Anne Harrop, and she’s all of 7 lbs, 2 oz.
Forgive my happiness; she’s beautiful.
jessica2.jpg
Jessica is also my first grand-child.
Special thanks to my son Keith and his lovely wife Rachel for such a present! Rachel is doing well, though she’s understandably very tired after a delayed and rather long delivery.
Yet it was especially considerate of Jessica to take her time – an extra week – in arriving so she could share a birthday with her… hey, what am I now?
A grandpa? I am sooooo not ready for this. Folks think I’m not old enough; my career’s on hold; I’m not even “gray” yet.
Not to worry Jessica dear, panic attack over. You’re a bright and inspiring new Light in our lives. May our world yet be a saner and happier place with you in it.

“Consider the blameless; observe the upright; there is a future for the man – and woman – of peace.”
— Psalm 37:37

Senator Chuck Hagel to “retire”

The New York Times web site is reporting that Senator Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, will not run for re-election to the Senate, nor for the White House.
We’ve written about Senator Hagel here before, in general admiring his status as a rare Republican foreign policy maverick, a clear-thinker with the credentials, the experience, and most importantly, the nerve to stand up to the neconservative infiltration and takeover of the Republican Party.
Hagel was anti-war on Iraq, when being anti-Iraq war wasn’t cool…. in either party. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hagel early on warned of Vietnam ghosts in Iraq.
Yet Hagel has been a creature of the US Senate, and in that political role, he’s often bent with the wind, (such as on the habeas corpus for detainees issue) perhaps in hopes of living to fry bigger political fish. That earned him the back-handed compliment from one Nebraska blogger:

“He’s Chuck Hagel, folks – the thinking man’s unthinking Republican. And, you almost have to like him; you just can’t count on him.”

I think that’s too harsh, but I find myself disappointed that he apparently hasn’t found a viable way to run for national office next year.
So what’s behind Hagel’s decision not to run for anything next year – at least not at this time?

1. Was it his disgust with his own Republican Party? I’ve seen reports that neoconservatives were raising mountains of out-of-state cash for a nasty challenge to Hagel in the upcoming Republican primary.
2. Was it a sense that the Republican Party stands on the threshold of being crushed next year in the US Senate? That prospect, perhaps ironically, increases with Hagel withdrawing. If fellow veteran Bob Kerry indeed returns to Nebraska, the Democrats might well add Hagel’s seat to their Senate winnings next year. (They could also take John Warner’s seat here in Virginia, provided they can find another “maverick” like Jim Webb.)
3. If that indeed is his assessment, might Hagel be calculating that it’s more prudent for him to sit this slaughter out, and be available as the elder “realist” statesman to help with a Republican reconstruction by 2012?
4. Or is Hagel “thinking” yet again — that there might still be a chance for re-surfacing on a serious third party ticket for the White House next year? Perhaps Sam Waterston’s “Unity08” might yet persuade him. Or maybe New York’s Mayor Bloomberg might draft him — as David Broder recently suggested.

In my opinion, the Republican Party is in crisis mode, even as it refuses to admit it. It has strayed dangerously far from its own grand heritage as the Party of Lincoln, “TR,” “IKE,” and even “the Gipper.” Worse, it has abandoned all too many fundamental American values.
With most of the Republican Presidential candidates, including Fred Thompson, now running hawkishly to the right of Dick Cheney, Chuck Hagel could take a huge chunk of disaffected “Eisenhower Republicans” with him, wherever and whenever he goes. I sense many anti-war-party Democrats also admire and might support Hagel, should the Democratic candidates self-destruct in kow-towing to the neocon returnees into their ranks. Ah, wishful thinking?
Hagel’s formal announcement on Monday should be interesting. I’m counting on him not to go quietly.

Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?

I learned today of a particularly disturbing political cartoon published on September 4th in the Columbus (Ohio) Post-Dispatch. Drawn by Michael Ramirez, the cartoon very much illustrates themes I’ve written about here several times before — that when all else in the Middle East fails, the change-the-subject Bush/Cheney Administration and friends can resort to the fail-safe “blame Iran game” as the root of all such troubles.
The cartoon in question displays a regional map with Iran and a sewer pipe at its center, the source of hordes of cockroaches infesting the region. You can see the Dispatch version here. I have since discovered that the cartoon was first published on June 25th, in full color, in the internationally circulated Investors’ Business Daily. (click here or here)
Before presenting additional details about the artist and the controversy, I am pleased to publish here an eloquent and courageous open letter to the Columbus Post-Dispatch, from Marsha B. Cohen, a scholarly colleague at Florida International University in Miami. (with my emphasis added)
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From: Marsha Cohen
To the Editor: Columbus Post Dispatch

For over four decades, Fidel Castro has been considered one of the most odious leaders in the Western hemisphere. After he took power, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled their island home for Miami (where I live and work), and where they have prospered. Many of them have been among the most vocal opponents of any moves by the US government to normalize relations with Cuba. Even now that Castro is old and sick, and at death’s door, he remains a hated symbol of a revolution gone wrong, that rapidly morphed into a detested enemy of the interests and values of the US.
Nevertheless, no Florida newspaper would ever dare to depict Cuba as a sewer, with cockroaches from it spreading out across North and South America. The outrage expressed, even by the regime’s most vociferous opponents, to the insult to their Cuban identity and beloved homeland, would put the police on crisis alert, and make headlines throughout the entire country.
Yet in an editorial cartoon, published on Sept 4. the Columbus Dispatch had no compunctions about portraying Iran as a sewer, and Iranians as cockroaches. Its decision to do so–regardless of the political motives of the editorial board, of the artist, or the message they were trying to convey–is unfortunate, and reflects more shamefully on the values and integrity of your newspaper than on the Iranian people, both in Iran and and those who have made their home in this country and other parts of the world, that this cartoon (whether intentionally or unintentionally) maligned and demeaned.
I hope that every organization that considers itself a champion of civil and human rights will express its outrage at the publication of this cartoon. Had the “cockroaches” been designated Jews, Blacks or Hispanics, the cartoon never would have made it into print in a respectable newspaper. And if it did, the objections and the fury generated throughout the community would have been loud, swift and resonant.
Anyone who would not want to see themselves and their ethnic group depicted in this way by a cartoonist is morally obligated to vociferously object to its publication. While the rights of a free press may extend to the promotion of racism, hatred and dehumanization, this does not mean you, as a newspaper, are obligated to exercise that right, or that decent people everywhere should not denounce your decision to do so when you do. Your disgusting representation of Iranians–irrespective of their regime–deserves nothing less than nationwide condemnation.
Sincerely,
Marsha B. Cohen
Miami, Florida

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Well said and thanks Marsha Cohen.
A few additional tidbits on the cartoonist and the controversy:

Continue reading “Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?”

An Iranian Surprise (or not)

I’m pre-occupied at the moment on two legacy projects, including an essay on former Iranian President Khatami. Nearly a year ago here at Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson studies, Khatami’s comments on the compatibility of Islam with Democracy included the assertion that even Iran’s supreme “Leader,” currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi, is subject to popular will.
While his extended comments deserve more careful discernment, Khatami and allied Iranian reformers have continued to advance what some observers will deem a “revolutionary” suggestion. Yet it’s also a view that Iran’s naysayers and those itching for a confrontation will be loathe to concede.
Khatami will contend that what he has in mind isn’t “revolutionary” at all, as it’s already in Iran’s constitution, in the form of Iran’s Assembly of Experts – (Majlis-e Kobragan), a body whose 86 members must be elected. The Experts Assembly in turn has responsibility for selecting and monitoring the performance of Iran’s Leader — even removing the Leader, as they might see fit.
Last fall, the doubters emphasized variations on a theme – that the Experts Assembly, Iran’s presumed “College of Cardinals,” was either irrelevant, ignored, captive to hardline clerics, or unrepresentative of popular sentiment due to vetting of candidates, etc., etc. In any case, “the system,” we were knowingly instructed, would never permit popular sentiment to play a real role over the Leader.
Last December 14th, on the eve of Iran’s fifth elections for this assembly, the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute hosted a forum where the main “theme” offered by distinguished observers was that the Experts Assembly was a “disabled body” – one that would remain controlled by hardliners.
Funny thing, somebody forgot to tell Iran’s moderate conservatives and reformists that the elections were meaningless and a foregone conclusion. They coalesced around former Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani – to hand key hardline figures a startling defeat on Dec. 15th. Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, the presumed mentor to Iran’s current firebrand President Ahmadinejad, tellingly placed a distant 7th in Tehran voting, far behind front runner Rafsanjani. Turn out was higher than past Assembly elections, in part because voters perceived real choices and stakes at hand.
Undaunted, the Iran doubters were out yet again before yesterday’s internal elections at the Experts Assembly to select a new chairman to replace a deceased former chair. Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar confidently predicted that

“In all likelihood, the right wing conservatives, headed by Ayatollah Yazdi, will beat moderate conservatives because they seem more united and organized. The infighting between moderate conservatives will most probably mean that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, their best known candidate, will be unable to pull off a ‘Shimon Peres,’ and suddenly emerge as a winner after a string of losses. Unfortunately for the West, this means that the chances for a compromise in the nuclear talks will be less likely, as this group is the one most likely to back such an option.”

Javendar, like the AEI forum, got it rather backwards.
Rafsanjani, already head of Iran’s powerful Expediency Council, has been elected Chair of the Assembly of Experts. Echoing Khatami’s views, one Reuters report cited analysts who

“…said the election showed that more moderate conservatives like Rafsanjani were gaining ground in Iran, where there is increasing discontent with the ruling hard-liners over rising tensions with the West, a worsening economy and price hikes in basic commodities and housing….
Rafsanjani’s election is yet another no to the fossilized extremists
While extremists… propo[und] the theory that the legitimacy of Iran’s clerics to rule the country is derived from God, Rafsanjani is believed to side with pro-democracy reformers who believe the government’s authority is derived from popular elections.”

The doubters though are already explaining it away, beginning with Michael Slackman who opines in today’s New York Times,

“Theoretically, Mr. Rafsanjani should be a powerful force…. But Ayatollah Khamenei has the final say on all matters of state. He has shown no interest in restoring Mr. Rafsanjani’s influence and has long viewed him as a challenge to his own authority, many political analysts said.”

Never mind that the Assembly ostensibly has the final say over Khamenehi. For Slackman to be more optimistic would undercut his own lead story, also in today’s NYTimes, on how “hard times and isolation” are actually helping hardliners maintain their power.
I’ve never quite accepted the all-too-easy view that Rafsanjani and Khamenehi are necessarily at loggerheads; sometimes they’re on what R.K. Ramazani once referred to as the same “tandem bicycle.”
Flatly at odds with Slackman, consider Barbara Slavin’s USA Today report: “Iranian Shakeup a Setback for Hardliners.” Note she has quotes supporting this interpretation from two of the speakers (Khalaji & Sammii) at last December’s AEI forum (the very one that didn’t see change coming to the Experts Assembly…)
Alas, Slavin closes her story with a quote from CRS Iran-watcher Kenneth Katzman who attributes potentially encouraging signs of change in Iran to US pressure. If only it was that simple.
The skeptics will have it both ways, as usual. The prospects for Iranian reforms are either a. rendered less likely while Iran is under siege and/or b. somehow attributable to external pressures when they do materialize.
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Footnote: I am particularly struck that Mehdi Khalaji (of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) has apparently changed his tune to now lend support to Slavin’s report theme that Rafsanjani’s new position and the recent change at the top of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are both challenges to hardliners around President Ahmadinejad.
Contrast this view with the breathless reporting in Murdoch Media on Sunday, specifically the London Times, by disinformation specialist Uzi Mahnaimi. (the one whom Jonathan Edelstein noted here at jwn last Jan. 8th “seems to make a career of revealing that Israel is about to attack Iran.”) Now he spins one about the Guard leader change being a victory for hardliners, and his only mentioned source is the notoriously unreliable “National Council of Resistance of Iran” – (aka PMOI, MEK, etc. — a group which ironically has been on the US State Department’s terrorist list for the past decade.)

Secluded trail “Secret” in Ch’ville

I, for one, am impressed that Helena manages to keep running, and running well, even while writing an instant important book. Bravo!
Alas, I’ve not been one to run much on hard surfaces, not since breaking an ankle running X-country decades ago on a hard road course in West Chester, PA. Yet I have been “running” a lot lately, mostly on softer surfaces. I’m always on the look-out for “softer” trails for walking and running — and getting away from cars and crowds.
At the risk then of spoiling a well-kept exercise secret around Charlottesville, I recently have been enjoying the new extensions to the Saunders Trail system. I am not talking about the popular Saunders Trail that begins at a parking area near the intersections of Route 53 and 20 and extends nearly two miles to the Monticello entrance.
The core Saunders Trail is so well designed and maintained by the private Monticello Foundation that even wheel-chair athletes can enjoy its perfect grading. I recommend the upper boardwalk section of the main trail late in the fall, when the leaves are down and just before sunset — great vistas.
But I’ve never been one to stick to the “beaten path.” So last fall I began exploring rather un-marked side trails that cut up into the steep hills along the trails. Somebody maintains these side trails nicely. If you go back these side trails, don’t be in a hurry — as they can be confusing, until you come to the next intersection. (!) For locals who know the general topography, such mild uncertainty is “invigorating.”
The newest formal addition to the Saunders trail system comes in the form of 2+ miles of informal mowed trails that wind in and around the 150 acre “Secluded Farm.” If you like “soft trails” in pastoral settings, these are great for exercise and for reflection. Road-runners may find the “carpets” soothing when the joints get sore from pavement pounding.
Alas, unless you get high up onto the ridge, the sounds of highways and “civilization” are often too nearby. (For a real escape, that’s what the George Washington National Forest or Shenandoah are for — but those fragile glimpses of paradise are an hour away.)
For a regular nearby sanctuary, I’m grateful to Monticello for these trails and for not charging us to enjoy them. May these “green pastures” go on restoring many a soul and heart.
And let’s keep it a secret too. :-}