Category: Iran

The U.S. Congress pushes for war with Iran

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By Stephen Zunes

In another resolution apparently designed to prepare for war against Iran, the U.S. House of Representatives, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 401–11 vote, has passed a resolution (HR 568) urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran “that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”

With its earlier decision to pass a bill that effectively sought to ban any negotiations between the United States and Iran, a huge bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. According to Iranian-American analyst Jamal Abdi, a prominent critic of both the Iranian regime and U.S. policy, the motivation for the resolution may be to “poison those talks by signaling to Iran that the President is weak, domestically isolated, and unable to deliver at the negotiating table because a hawkish Congress will overrule him.”Read More »

An innocent victim of our sanctions against Iran

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Or how “high” politics are connected to the lives of Iranians even abroad

By Jan Oberg

I’ve come to know a young Iranian student here in Sweden. Fortunately he came before the discriminatory law that forces students from outside EU to pay for their studies while those from inside the EU can study freely.

Kourosh – a name I use for the purpose of this article – is a very modest, diligent and polite young man. He has quickly learned to talk everyday Swedish. He sees his life in Sweden as a great privilege and an opportunity to go back to his native Iran and make it a better place. Since I have applied for a visa to go to Iran, I’ve been eager to meet with him and listen to what he can tell me about Iranian culture and about how life has been for his family. The father is a truck driver turned farmer; the family is not among the poorest but also not in the upper class. Read More »

Goodbye to the Iran nuclear bomb?

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By Jonathan Power

Is it agreement time in Iran? Is Iran going to bend to the will of the UN Security Council and engineer a compromise that will allow it to enrich uranium – but only to a small degree – in return for allowing the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to intimately monitor its nuclear industry to assure it doesn’t enrich further to enable it to build a nuclear weapon?

The West and Israel in particular have long been in a panic about a possible Iranian nuclear bomb. There is a strong “bomb Iran before it is too late” faction in the US Republican Party and even more so in Israel. This has never made sense if one reads the tea-leaves carefully.Read More »

Rational conflict resolution: What stands in the way?*

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By Johan Galtung

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities.

Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?Read More »

Iran & Israel: What the West should and can do

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By Jan Oberg (951 words)

IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE, APRIL 2012 © IPS and the author
Editor’s note:

The overall picture has turned much worse over the last few months. In particular, the Western demands to Iran made public prior to the Istanbul consultations on April 14, bodes ill for the next round of talks in Baghdad. Everyone has stated views, used rhetoric and taken concrete steps that bring us all closer to the abyss called ‘War on Iran’. While it is easy and dangerous to escalate a conflict, it is difficult ­without losing face­ to de-escalate and make peace, writes Jan Oberg, director and co-founder of the Transnational Foundation (TFF) in Lund, Sweden.

Among these counterproductive steps are the Western halting of imports of oil from Iran on July 1, 2012 and the tightening of sanctions that already suffocate Iranian society. It is believed – ­falsely­ – that sanctions are somehow “soft weapons”. In Iraq, with one-third of the population of Iran, Western sanctions caused roughly one million Iraqi deaths.

What is indicative of a will to promote future peace among the parties? Well, the following are not: pre-negotiation demands, threats to destroy, an oil embargo, sanctions directed at citizens, condescending rhetoric to and about a nation with one of the oldest civilisations in the world, murdering its scientists, providing military training to its dissident terrorists abroad, telling it to abstain from what you have yourself done and requiring inspections there but not with the nuclear-armed “other side”. These are methods to make Tehran consider obtaining nukes although Iran’s highest leader has pronounced repeatedly that nuclear weapons are haram, i.e. strictly prohibited according to Islam (a fact never reported in Western media).

The world needs conflict-resolution capacity, knowledge and training. Those who run these matters steer their policies like unlicenced drivers. Under such conditions, accidents will happen and people will die. There is a huge spectrum of options between doing nothing and smashing up countries by military means.

This article offers plenty of constructive proposals.Read More »

Why Europe is not yet a ‘Culture of Peace’

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By Richard Falk

It is undoubtedly true that the greatest unacknowledged achievement of the European Union (EU) is to establish ‘a culture of peace’ within its regional enclosure for the 68 years since 1944. This has meant not only the absence of war in Europe, but also the absence of ‘war talk,’ threats, crises, and sanctions, with the single important exception of the NATO War of 1999 that was part of the fallout from the breakup of former Yugoslavia.

This was undertaken by the American-led alliance both to accomplish the de facto independence of Kosovo from Serbian rule, to ensure the post-Cold War viability of NATO, to reinforce the lesson of the Gulf War (1991) that the West could win wars at low costs due to their military superiority, and to rescue Albanian Kosovars from a possible humanitarian catastrophe at the hands of their Serb oppressors.Read More »

Get the law and politics right in Iran now!

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By Richard Falk

In his important article in the New York Times, March 17, 2012, James Risen summarized the consensus of the intelligence community as concluding that Iran abandoned its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, and that no persuasive evidence exists that it has departed from this decision.

It might have been expected that such news based on the best evidence that billions spent to get the most reliable possible assessments of such sensitive security issues would produce a huge sigh of relief in Washington, but on the contrary it has been totally ignored, including by the highest officers in the government. Read More »

Tonight I lost my last bit of sympathy for President Obama

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By Jan Oberg

A man shall be judged more by his deeds than by his words, says President Obama. That is what I do to him here. On the basis of what he has done and says he will do.

This is President Obama’s most nasty, bellicose, one-sided and perversely power-arrogant speech ever. The Nobel Committee ought to revoke its Prize to him, but of course it won’t.

This cynical man speaks about the goodness of even more “crippling” sanctions on a country of 75 million people of which 25 % are children under 14.

At every single aspect he touches upon, he takes the wrong path: towards making war irreversible. There is no excuse that it was for AIPAC. In contrast to George W. Bush, he is neither ignorant, under-educated, or un-intelligent. That’s what makes it so serious, so tragic.

Among several remarkable things is that the President here also gives a carte blanche to Israel deciding alone what it will do in the future vis-a-vis Iran.

Under no circumstance can the U.S. under this man serve in a peaceful role, and it’s laughable to argue that it can be a mediator in the Middle East.
Pray that I am wrong but this speech, combined with everything else that goes on these months, makes me predict war on Iran within 4-6 months.

Addendum:
Of course this speech figures only on 2-3 front pages of the Western mainstream press the day after; they are more interested for a 2nd day in the likely, but so far undocumented, election fraud in Russia. Most editors probably don’t know what AIPAC is, or why Obama’s words in that forum are so important.

Iran, Israel and the USA

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How to prevent the war that is becoming more likely?

By Gunnar Westberg
TFF Board member who has visited Iran a number of times the last few years

The threat of a war involving Iran, Israel and USA is discussed with increasing intensity. At this time an attack by Israel is seen as the most likely risk.

Do I, decidedly not an expert, have the right to say that most contributions are lacking in depth and there is little attempt to understand the other parties? I say so, and I hope to be proven wrong.Read More »

Israel-USA vs Iran: Talk Peace!

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By Johan Galtung

The state system at its worst: trading insults and threats, sanctions, readiness to use extreme violence, forward deployment of US troops in Israel as hostages to guarantee US involvement, disregard for common people and the effects of warfare in the Middle East and the world. The options are harder sanctions, or war. The far better option, sitting down, with mediators, talking and searching for solutions, is absent. Polarization, escalation, the material of which wars are made fill the media. What a shame.Read More »