Following meetings with top Israeli officials, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the US would seek tough new sanctions against the Iranian government if it rejected the US offer for talks.

Gates vowed that such measures would not be incremental.

Though Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak used the meeting as an opportunity to again hint at military action against Iran, Gates said, however, that he “had every sense that the Israeli government is prepared to let our strategy play out.”

Gates’ comments appeared to be more intended to placate Israeli impatience over the Obama Administration’s attempts at diplomacy with Iran, though he did warn that the offer for talks was not “open-ended.” Last week Israel condemned comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying they suggested the US was resigned to Iran having nuclear weapons.

Despite US and Israeli officials’ persistant threats over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, Yukiya Amano, the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says there is no evidence the nation is even working on such weapons.

Ehud Barak warns Iran of possible Israeli strike on nuclear facilities

• West Offering to Endorse Israeli Attack on Iran as Part of Settlement Deal
• Israeli FM: US Will Accept Any Israeli Decision
• Clinton Threatens to Attack Iran ‘The Way That We Did’ Iraq

Article printed from News From Antiwar.com: http://news.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/07/27/gates-threatens-tough-sanctions-against-iran/

A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the announcement of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.

There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs' lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad's attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.

Commentators are "explaining" the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad's win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.

On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, 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 protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine.

It requires total blindness not to see this.

Daniel McAdams has made some telling points. http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw
/archives/027782.html For example, neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.” How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim? This looks like definite evidence that the US is involved in the election protests.

Timmerman goes on to write that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars promoting ‘color’ revolutions . . . Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.” Timmerman’s own neocon Foundation for Democracy is “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts220609.htm

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Online Journal
Jun 19, 2009

Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror  tells the story of the overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddeq, by the CIA and the British MI6 in 1953. The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen, and reporters, and paid Iranians to demonstrate in the streets.

The 1953 street demonstrations, together with the Cold War claim that the US had to grab Iran before the Soviets did, served as the US government’s justification for overthrowing Iranian democracy. What the Iranian people wanted was not important.

Today, the street demonstrations in Tehran show signs of orchestration. The protesters, primarily young people, especially young women opposed to the dress codes, carry signs written in English: “Where Is My Vote?” The signs are intended for the Western media -- not for the Iranian government.

More evidence of orchestration is provided by the protesters’ chant, “Death to the dictator, death to Ahmadinejad.” Every Iranian knows that the president of Iran is a public figure with limited powers. His main role is to take the heat from the governing grand ayatollah. No Iranian, and no informed Westerner, could possibly believe that Ahmadinejad is a dictator. Even Ahmadinejad’s superior, Khamenei, is not a dictator, as he is appointed by a government body that can remove him.

The demonstrations, like those in 1953, are intended to discredit the Iranian government and to establish for Western opinion that the government is a repressive regime that does not have the support of the Iranian people. This manipulation of opinion sets up Iran as another Iraq ruled by a dictator who must be overthrown by sanctions or an invasion.

On American TV, the protesters who are interviewed speak perfect English. They are either Westernized secular Iranians who were allied with the Shah and fled to the West during the 1978 Iranian revolution or they are the young Westernized residents of Tehran. 

Many of the demonstrators may be sincere in their protest, hoping to free themselves from Islamic moral codes. But if reports of the US government’s plans to destabilize Iran are correct, paid troublemakers are in their ranks.

Some observers, such as George Friedman, believe that the American destabilization plan will fail. However, many ayatollahs feel animosity toward Ahmadinejad, who assaults the ayatollahs for corruption. Many in the Iranian countryside believe that the ayatollahs have too much wealth and power. Amadinejad’s attack on corruption resonates with the Iranian countryside, but not with the ayatollahs. 

Amadinejad’s campaign against corruption has brought Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri out against him. Montazeri is a rival to ruling Ayatollah Khamenei. Montazeri sees in the street protests an opportunity to challenge Khamenei for the leadership role. 

So, once again, as so many times in history, the ambitions of one person might seal the fate of the Iranian state.

Khamenei knows that the elected president is an underling. If he has to sacrifice Amadinejad’s election in order to fend off Montazeri, he might recount the vote and elect Mousavi, thinking that will bring an end to the controversy.

Khamenei, solving his personal problem, would play into the hands of the American-Israeli assault on his country. 

On the surface, the departure of Ahmadinejad would cost Israel and the US the loss of their useful “anti-Semitic” boogeyman. But in fact it would play into the American-Israeli propaganda. The story would be that the remote, isolated, Iranian ruling ayatollah was forced by the Iranian people to admit the falsity of the rigged election, calling into question rule by ayatollahs who do not stand for election.

Mousavi and Ayatollah Montazeri are putting their besieged country at risk. Possibly they believe that ridding Iran of Amadinejad’s extreme image would gain Iran breathing room.

If Mousavi and Montazeri succeed in their ambitions, one likely result would be a loss in Iran’s independence. The new rulers would have to continually defend Iran’s new moderate and reformist image by giving in to American demands. If the government admits to a rigged election, the legitimacy of the Iranian Revolution would be called into question, setting up Iran for more US interference in its internal affairs.

For the American neoconservatives, democratic countries are those countries that submit to America’s will, regardless of their form of government. “Democracy” is achieved by America ruling through puppet officials. 

The American public might never know whether the Iranian election was legitimate or stolen. The US media serves as a propaganda device, not as a purveyor of truth. Election fraud is certainly a possibility -- it happens even in America -- and signs of fraud have appeared. Large numbers of votes were swiftly counted, which raises the question whether votes were counted or merely a result was announced.

The US media’s response to the election was equally rapid. Having invested heavily in demonizing Ahmadinejad, the media are unwilling to accept election results that vindicate Ahmadinejad and declared fraud in advance of evidence, despite the pre-election poll results published in the June 15 Washington Post, which found Ahmadinejad to be the projected winner.

There are many American interest groups that have a vested interest in the charge that the election was rigged. What is important to many Americans is not whether the election was fair, but whether the winner’s rhetoric is allied with their goals.

For example, those numerous Americans who believe that both presidential and congressional elections were stolen during the Karl Rove Republican years are tempted to use the Iranian election protests to shame Americans for accepting the stolen Bush elections.

Feminists take the side of the “reformer” Mousavi.

Neoconservatives damn the election for suppressing the “peace candidate” who might acquiescent to Israel’s demands to halt the development of Iranian nuclear energy.

Ideological and emotional agendas result in people distancing themselves from factual and analytical information, preferring instead information that fits with their material interests and emotional disposition.

The primacy of emotion over fact bids ill for the future. The extraordinary attention given to the Iranian election suggests that many American interests and emotions have a stake in the outcome.

email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

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http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4823.shtml

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Authors of heavily-quoted poll changed their conclusion to support validity of Ahmadinejad landslide.

Western media, along with thousands of Iranians protesting around the world, have formed a rough consensus over the six days since Iran's Presidential Election that Ahmadinejad's victory was the result of widespread fraud. However, a recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post* references a rare public opinion poll in suggesting that the election may indeed have been fair.

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3884&updaterx=2009-06-18+03%3A28%3A10

The Iranian People Speak:
* http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html

WSWS
18 June 2009

Amid rhetoric about his commitment to the “universal values” of democratic processes and free speech, US President Barack Obama made one unintentionally revealing statement on Iran Tuesday. “It’s not productive, given the history of the US-Iranian relationship, to be seen as meddling,” he said.

The statement was meant as an explanation of the Obama administration’s failure to join the Iranian opposition led by the defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in explicitly denouncing last Friday’s presidential election as a “fraud” and as a defense against criticism from the Republican right in the US.

Before Obama made the statement, his Republican opponent in the 2008 election, Arizona Senator John McCain condemned the administration’s reticence, declaring that Obama “should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election and that the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”

Obama’s choice of words, however, spoke volumes. The US should not “be seen as meddling”; as for the meddling itself, that is clearly another matter.

The president’s reference to “the history of the US-Iranian relationship” refers to the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew the country’s nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who two years earlier had begun to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, until then controlled by Britain.

The coup ushered in the 26-year, US-backed rule of the Shah and SAVAK, his brutal secret police, which ended only with the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Nearly one year after the coup, in August 1954, the New York Times published an editorial succinctly explaining the motives behind the CIA action: “Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism,” the paper editorialized. “It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran’s experience will prevent the rest of Mossadeqs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and far-seeing leaders.”

The obvious question is: what fundamentally has changed in “the US-Iranian relationship” since those days? Washington—under Obama as under Bush—is continuing two colonial-style wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, i.e., on Iran’s western and eastern borders, that have claimed the lives of over one million people. The aim of these wars is the same as the objective of the coup of 1953—control of “rich resources” and the pipeline routes for extracting them from the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

Behind the statements of concern about the elections and the subsequent repression in Iran, US imperialism is prepared to carry out even greater crimes against the Iranian people.

Washington does not want to be seen as playing a direct role in seeking to destabilize the Iranian government for fear that it would provoke a popular backlash because of this history. While US agencies work covertly, the Obama administration leaves the direct propaganda operations to the press and to its European allies.

The most prominent role has been played by the New York Times, the same newspaper that was decisive in promoting the phony “weapons of mass destruction” pretext for the war against Iraq. In 1953, the Times not merely endorsed the coup in Iran editorially; through its correspondent, Kenneth Love, it worked intimately with those who organized it.

In the current crisis, without citing any objective evidence, the Times reported as fact the Iranian opposition’s claims that the election was rigged, that the 62.6 percent victory declared for incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was impossible and that Mousavi had been the real victor. This version of events has generally been echoed by the rest of the media.

Also serving as propaganda agents for US imperialism’s destabilization operation in Iran are the pseudo-lefts around the Nation magazine, which under the Obama administration has emerged every bit as much a house organ of US imperialism as the Times itself. On Wednesday it posted an article by its foreign policy correspondent Robert Dreyfuss, who acknowledged, “I’m biased. I support the Green Revolution,” referring to the forces gathered behind Mousavi.

He then went on to portray these forces in fairly objective terms. “The anti-Ahmadinejad coalition is deep and broad,” he wrote. “It includes conservative, Old Guard founders of the Islamic Republic, who view Ahmadinejad with disdain ...; the large and growing majority of Iranian clerics and senior ayatollahs, many of whom have long viewed the Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as an upstart and usurper ...; nearly the entirety of Iran’s business class, especially those involved in high-tech, aviation, oil and gas, and heavy industry, who blame Ahmadinejad for his catastrophic mismanagement of the economy” as well as so-called “reformists” like former President Khatami and Mousavi, and “the educated elite.”

What is described here are the wealthiest and most privileged layers of Iranian society, which together constitute a decisive layer of the country’s ruling political establishment. What is noticeably missing from this “coalition” is the working class and the rural poor, the overwhelming majority of the Iranian population.

In all of the giddy commentary in the media about a “twitter revolution,” there has been no suggestion by anyone that Mousavi enjoys the support of the workers and the most oppressed layers of Iranian society.

What is the Obama administration attempting to accomplish with its covert intervention—loudly promoted by its erstwhile “liberal” and “left” supporters—in the Iranian election?

It is not aiming for “regime change” along the lines of Iraq. Certain lessons have been learned from the Bush administration’s debacle, most critically that disbanding the military and the security forces in a country targeted for US domination is a fatal mistake. These are the forces upon which imperialism must rely for imposing policies that will spell intensified oppression for the majority of the population and for suppressing any genuine revolutionary movement of the masses.

What Washington wants is to effect a change in personnel at the top of the Iranian regime that would bring about a change in policy favoring US geo-strategic interests in Iran and the surrounding region. In Mousavi and those backing him, the Obama administration sees the possibility of shifting Tehran toward more open collaboration in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while promoting “free market” economic policies that would open up the country for exploitation by US-based oil conglomerates and other transnationals.

The reasons for Washington’s apparent caution is not just the history of US-Iranian relations, but also the fear that the fissures within the ruling circles in Iran and the mobilizations in the streets could get out of hand. Despite their size, the mass demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere have been dominated by the better-off and better-educated sectors of Iranian society. If broader social forces were to come into struggle against the government, and Mousavi, his billionaire backer Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and others in the ruling establishment were to lose control, the US could face the threat of a new Iranian Revolution.

It is for this more fundamental struggle that Iranian workers, students and youth must prepare. The present political confrontation is taking place within a narrow circle of the Iranian ruling elite, whose interests and aspirations are totally at odds with those of Iranian working people. Neither the repressive right-wing demagogue Ahmadinejad nor the well-heeled “reformers” around Mousavi offer any way forward for the working class. 

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