Category: Middle East

Iran Nuclear Deal: Can One Dare Hope?

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By Farhang Jahanpour

After 36 years of hostility between Iran and the West and 13 years of nuclear negotiations, first involving Iran and the European Troika (Britain, France and Germany), followed by the P5+1 (the above countries plus the United States, Russia and China), it seems that finally one can start to be optimistic and hope that a long, dark chapter will come to an end.

The next few days up to the end of March are the most crucial days in this long road, but after many ups and downs and many false hopes the end may be in sight. To be sure, nothing is certain until the final announcement has been made. Still powerful forces are hard at work to prevent the success of the talks, but there is some room for optimism. The important point to bear in mind is that talks with Iran were never only about Iran’s nuclear program.

The victory of the Islamic revolution toppled the staunchly pro-Western Mohammad Reza Shah who was acting as the gendarme of the region on behalf of the West, and replaced him with intensely anti-Western Ayatollah Khomeini who wanted to spread the Islamic revolution and replace the existing order with a religious theocracy. The revolution created the biggest upset in the history of the Middle East since the end of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East among various European colonial powers.

With the start of the Cold War and the rise of the American superpower, the Middle East was divided between the two blocs, with some countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Algeria leaning towards the East and other countries such as Iran, Turkey and Persian Gulf monarchies leaning towards the West. Despite occasional upsets, that situation had remained fairly stable until the victory of the Iranian revolution.Read More »

TFF PressInfo 315: Happy Norooz – peace in the new year?

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Jan Oberg

By Jan Oberg

Today is New Year – Norooz – for 300 million people. It is Equinox. It is International Day of Happiness – and it is the 12th Anniversary of the US-led war on Iraq

The nuclear deal and Israel

One must hope that the new year brings a fair deal concerning the nuclear issues between Iran and the members of the UN Security Council + Germany.

If the U.S. will not sign because it insists that the counterproductive and unfair sanctions shall not be lifted completely and as soon as technically possible, the deal should be signed with the other parties. The US must have no monopoly on this.

One must also hope that Israel will not attack Iran – but with the re-election of PM Netanyahu that risk has increased.

He seems to be obsessed about a threat from Iran, a country that has not invaded any other country for more than 250 years, has no nuclear weapons and considers nuclear weapons “haram” – strictly forbidden.

With a 10 times larger population Iran has roughly the same military expenditures as Israel.Read More »

Iran’s nuclear program: Diplomacy, war, and (in)security in the Nuclear Age

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Richard Falk

By Richard Falk
March 18, 2015

Perhaps, Netanyahu deserves some words of appreciation, at least from the Israeli hard right, for the temporary erasure of the Palestinian ordeal from national, regional, and global policy agendas. Many are distracted by the Republican recriminations directed at Obama’s diplomatic initiative to close a deal that exchanges a loosening of sanctions imposed on Iran for an agreement by Tehran to accept intrusive inspections of their nuclear program and strict limits on the amount of enriched uranium of weapons grade that can be produced or retained.

We can only wonder about the stability and future prospects of the United States if 47 Republican senators can irresponsibly further jeopardize the peace of the Middle East and the world by writing an outrageous Open Letter to the leadership of Iran.

In this reckless political maneuver the government of Iran is provocatively reminded that whatever agreement may be reached by the two governments will in all likelihood be disowned if a Republican is elected president in 2016, or short of that, by nullifying actions taken by a Republican-controlled Congress.

Mr. Netanyahu must be smiling whenever he looks at a mirror, astonished by his own ability to get the better of reason and self-interest in America, by his pyrotechnic display of ill-informed belligerence in his March 2nd address to Congress. Surely, political theater of sorts, but unlike a performance artist, Netanyahu is a political player whose past antics have brought death and destruction and now mindlessly and bombastically risk far worse in the future.

What interests and disturbs me even more than the fallout from Netanyahu’s partisan speech, are several unexamined presuppositions that falsely and misleadingly frame the wider debate Read More »

The Iranian “bomb” and its questions

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By Jonathan Power

Where do Iran’s grand ideas about itself come from? From the history of its once great empire but also from the fact that the US encouraged Iran at the time of the Shah to both build up a nuclear industry and to become the regional power in the Gulf.

Where does all the misleading information about Iran’s apparent desire to build a nuclear weapon come from? Mainly from the politicians of Israel. (But not always from Israeli intelligence. Two of its former bosses have cast doubt on the views of the politicians.)

Where does the conviction of most of the US Congress that Iran is well on the way to building a bomb come from? US intelligence concluded in 2007 and has reaffirmed twice since that Iran abandoned its weapons program twelve years ago.

(Iran is, of course, enriching uranium, for use, it says, in its civilian power plans to enable it to use nuclear power when its oil reserves start to fall. It has also invested large amounts of money in wind and solar power.)

Why have negotiations never got off the ground until now? Initially, because President Bill Clinton was up to his eyes in negotiations with Israel and Palestine and also North Korea.

Why did his successor, George W. Bush, rule out cooperation with a country he regarded as part of “the axis of evil”, even refusing to respond to a conciliatory hand of friendship offered by Iran? Because at the back of his mind he thought if it became clear that Iran was set on building nuclear weapons the US could bomb to bits its nuclear research and development plants.Read More »

The real story behind the Republicans’ Iran letter

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Gareth Porter

By Gareth Porter

The “open letter” from Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican Senators to the leadership of Iran, which even Republicans themselves admit was aimed at encouraging Iranian opponents of the nuclear negotiations to argue that the United States cannot be counted on to keep the bargain, has created a new political firestorm. It has been harshly denounced by Democratic loyalists as “stunning” and “appalling”, and critics have accused the signers of the letter of being “treasonous” for allegedly violating a law forbidding citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.

But the response to the letter has primarily distracted public attention from the real issue it raises: how the big funders of the Likud Party in Israel control Congressional actions on Iran.

The infamous letter is a ham-handed effort by Republican supporters of the Netanyahu government to blow up the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. The idea was to encourage Iranians to conclude that the United States would not actually carry out its obligations under the agreement – i.e. the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Read More »

The “New World Order”

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Johan Galtung

By Johan Galtung Kuala Lumpur

…is the title of our conference. There will never be any such thing. “New”, yes; “World”, yes –“Order”, No. Wherever there is life there is contradiction, dialectic, forces and counter-forces. At the very obvious level the question arises – Order, in whose interest, against whom? Sow any new order and the seeds of its undoing are already taking root, sprouts are coming. As the Chinese say, “There are human beings without contradictions; they are called corpses.”

Follow that hint; go to the moon. New moons once a month, and order, the order of death, of non-life. The Old Moon Order.

As part of this Perdana Global Peace Foundation Conference, so well composed by Dr Hitam, President Tun Dr. Mahathir unveiled a giant copy of my book just published, Abolishing War: Criminalizing War, Removing War Causes, Removing War as an Institution (TPU and IIUM Press, 2015) together with a smaller book Clash of Civilizations[i]Read More »

TFF PressInfo # 313 – Ignore the 47 irresponsible US senators

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By Farhang Jahanpour and Jan Oberg



Jan Oberg

1. Despite the almost universal condemnation of PM Netanyahu’s speech, even by some of his supporters in the United States and Israel, it seems that Republican senators are not going to give up. One can only describe the letter by 47 Republican Senators to Iranian leaders as madness and even treason. Senator Tom Cotton who leads this initiative is deeply ignorant about the substance and about Iran.

2. They go against the wishes of President Obama and his negotiators and write to the supreme leader of Iran whom they have described as America’s worst enemy and worse than the ISIS with only one purpose: to torpedo the agreement. One should truly wonder at the honesty and sanity of such individuals.

3. Thankfully there are more moderate and thoughtful Americans who believe in the long-term interests of their country and the world, rather than being obsessed by the manufactured crisis by a foreign government or trying to score party points. (See links below).Read More »

On anti-semitism, criticizing Israel and Netanyahu – and blaming Jews and Muslims

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By Gunnar Westberg

The following question was asked to the ambassador of Israel to Sweden in one of the most respected programs on the Swedish Broadcasting (Sveriges Radio): “Do the Jews themselves carry any responsibility for the anti-Semitism we now see growing?”. (Translated by me from its official website). The ambassador refused to answer.

At the end of the program the responsible editor expressed a profound apology: “We wholeheartedly apologize for the question. It leads in the wrong direction and puts the guilt on individuals and unexposed groups”. The section was cut from the program recording although the original is stored in a public archive.

It seems like almost everyone in the media world agrees with this apology: “You should not ask such a question.” I agree. But we should ask “Does Israel carry any responsibility for the growing anti-Semitism?” Read More »

The Day After: Netanyahu

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By Richard Falk

Richard Falk

My reaction to Netanyahu’s theatrical performance yesterday in Congress led me to recall that the deepest thinkers turned against democracy in ancient Greece because of the susceptibility of the Athenian citizenry to demagogic oratory from opportunistic politicians. Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides all became sensitive to the degree to which the rhetoric of demagogues contributed to the decline, and eventual downfall, of ancient Athens. Yet even in the worst last days of Athens the demagogues who performed so destructively were at least homegrown!

It would have been inconceivable anywhere else than the United States for a controversial foreign leader to be welcomed before the legislative chamber to attack ongoing delicate diplomacy of the elected head of state. It is not merely a matter of the niceties of protocol as to whether the Speaker of the House was delinquent in not coordinating the invitation with the White House so as to agree on a date not so embarrassingly tied to Netanyahu’s bid for reelection on March 17, although such issues are not trivial.

More substantial, however, is what it tells us about this self-destructive embrace of a foreign leader that is unabashedly seeking to derail a critical foreign policy initiative clearly in the interest of the United States, the Middle East, and the world, and even Israel (although presumably not Netanyahu’s and Likud’s worldview).Read More »