Iran

If you only follow the mainstream news outlets, there's a fair chance that you have missed what is likely the biggest story this year - the current mass protests in Iran over the fraud of their recent election. From what I have seen and heard, it is being covered only in passing, and with absurd efforts to connect it to our own narrow political squabbles. But if you want to get a sense of what is really going on, I suggest poking around a bit - Andrew Sullivan is probably the best place to start. Though be warned, a lot of the material he is posting is pretty raw - meaning that it is bloody and violent, and much of it of indeterminate accuracy.

But given Iran's history (both recent and over the long scope of human civilization) and critical position in a volatile part of the world, what is happening there now is incredibly important. And in many ways, it shows both the best and the worst of humanity - the twin aspects of a quest for freedom and a dedicated hold on power no matter the cost.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my blog.)

The MRFF helps another atheist soldier file a suit against the Defense Department:

[link] Spc. Dustin Chalker, who has served in Korea and Iraq, is the second soldier at the northeast Kansas post to file such a lawsuit. The New Mexico-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation joined Chalker as a plaintiff in his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan.

Here's the PDF of the "Complaint For Injunctive Relief".

I wonder how long it will be before he receives his first drunken death threat from his fellow "good Christian" soldiers?

So, whad'ya think? Someone stand up and say that bombing Iran is madness? Release plans to the media?

Top U.S. Air Force official resigns: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley has resigned, and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne may also be on the brink of resigning, the defense publication InsideDefense.com reported on Thursday.

"Top-level Pentagon officials gave Moseley the option to resign or be fired during a meeting this morning," the website reported, quoting an unidentified military official. "Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne also could resign later today," it said.

Interesting.

UPDATE, 4:40 CDT: Seems that the spin is that this action was taken in response to the screw-ups in handling the nuclear weapons that the Air Force controls:

So - simple question: do you think that the US will launch some kind of significant attack against Iran sometime before the elections in November?

I ask because for months this has been the supposed plan - and there are indications that the information coming out of Iraq seems to be setting up justification for taking this action.

Personally, I think that it would be nearly suicidal for us to do so for a whole bunch of reasons. But almost nothing that the Bush Administration might do could surprise me at this point, no matter how stupid.

So, will we, or won't we?

Jim Downey

Seriously - this is like something out of a comedy sketch:

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

Here's an even better idea for the FBI/NSA/Omega Sector: just plant RFID tags in the falafel mix. Then they can trace exactly who buys it, follow them around after they've consumed it, and even know what bathroom facilities they like to use. Man, you could set up monitoring equipment to record their bowel movements!

Genius!

Jim Downey

So, three weeks ago I wrote about the initial reports that the Air Force had managed to lose track of some of its nukes, and accidentally transported them across the country.

Well, the story just keeps getting better. From the Washington Post this past Sunday:

Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.

The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge.

A little over two weeks ago, I suggested that Iran was behind Hezbollah's kidnapping of two IDF soldiers and that its motive was to foment war. That can be disputed, but my recurrent predictions that American and/or Israeli aggression fueled Iran's militancy turned out to be true.

[Link] The Israeli onslaught in Lebanon and Hezbollah's daily victories in the regional public relations war over the conflict threaten to claim a victim in Iran: whatever hopes remained of resurrecting the political reform movement.

Day by day, even as Iran's officials assess the military setbacks of Hezbollah, they have grown more and more emboldened by the gathering support in the Islamic world for the Iranian- backed Lebanese militia on the front line with Israel, which they see as a validation of their confrontational approach to foreign policy.

(...)

"It looks like, if Hezbollah gains victory, this crackdown will intensify against all those forces opposed to the current establishment," Behzad Nabavi, a former deputy speaker of Parliament who has called for dialogue with the United States, said in an interview.

I hate to say "I told you so," but there's little else I can do. It's not a novel or unexpected idea that governments use war as a way of cracking down on dissent at home. It's not even radical; when the government in question is not the speaker's, it's thoroughly mainstream.

I saw on CNN that Israel threatened to attack Syria, and that Iran threatened to take action if it did. This made me think, can Iran be behind Hezbollah's actions? It's well-known that Iran is Hezbollah's main source of arms and that they share a Shia form of Islamism.

Let's look at the situation from Ahmadinejad's point of view. He needs war with an outsider aggressor in order to preserve his regime. Bush used to be the perfect enemy, but now he's slowly backing off. Absent the US as an enemy, the next best thing is Israel. The best way to anger Israel is to use Hezbollah, which provides Iran with some political cover, and which conveniently has Syrian support.

In my previous post about the bombing match, I said Hezbollah upped the ante after Hamas kidnapped an IDF soldier. It may be the case: the week-long gap between the two kidnappings suggests that Hezbollah may have planned its initial strike right after Hamas's. But that alone does not explain why Hezbollah is suddenly interested in Israel, after a long hiatus in which it was interested primarily in winning power in the Lebanese government.

Militaries, and military-dominated governments such as Israel's, have a penchant for viewing force as the solution to every problem. Never mind that giving Ahmadinejad the ability to say that Iran is threatened by outsiders is almost the dictionary definition of "actions against Israel's self-interest"; the IDF is going to take every opportunity to escalate the conflict.

Hat-tip to Juan Cole: the neocon-slanted National Post has an article about a new law in Iran mandating "that all Iranians wear 'standard Islamic garments' designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing... It also envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public."

It's a very revolting, very condemning story. Only it's not true. Iran's sole Jewish member of Parliament said that "It is a lie, and the people who invented it wanted to make political gain." Even the National Post published an official redaction.

In related news, Iraqi troops ransacked Kuwaiti hospitals, looting incubators and leaving babies to die. After all, someone with a vested interest in an American war on Iraq said so, so it must be true. Also, the CIA has never engaged in psyops, and no media outlet is ever slanted to the right.

Hat-tip to Majikthise: according to the Iraqi defense ministry, Iranian forces entered Iraqi territory for the second time in ten days, and attacked the PKK:

[Link] Iranian troops bombed border areas near the town of Hajj Umran before crossing into Iraq, the defence ministry in Baghdad said on Sunday.

It said the Iranians targeted the PKK, a Kurdish group that has waged a 15-year insurgency against Turkey.

The PKK is believed to have links with anti-Iranian Kurdish fighters. There are no details on casualties.

The Iraqi defence ministry also says Iran launched a similar attack on Kurdish rebel positions in the same area on 21 April.

There are no reported comments from Tehran on either of the alleged incidents.

Via Appletree: Hu, Putin, and Ahmadinejad form closer ties. While the EU continues with its policy of de facto appeasing American aggression, other countries step up to the plate and actually do something to deter the US. As one commenter on Majikthise said, in response to another who compared American military action against Iran to World War Two: "The only way the WW2 comparison works is if we are Nazi Germany, Iran is the USSR, the EU is Britain, Britain is Italy and China is the USA."