Iran election roundup

Ahmadinejad Supporters
From June 30, 2008:

Report: U.S. ‘preparing the battlefield’ in Iran

VASHINGTON (CNN) — The Bush administration has launched a “significant escalation” of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country’s nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic’s government, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

White House, CIA and State Department officials declined comment on Hersh’s report, which appears in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.

Hersh told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” that Congress has authorized up to $400 million to fund the secret campaign, which involves U.S. special operations troops and Iranian dissidents

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From Thursday, 28 May 2009:

Iran: Many die in Zahedan mosque bombing

A bomb in a mosque in south-east Iran has killed at least 19 people and injured 60, the governor of Sistan-Baluchestan province said.
Although it occurred in a remote region, the explosion comes at a time of heightened political sensitivity nationally, with just over two weeks before the first round of the presidential election .

Fars news agency quoted witnesses saying the incident had been a suicide attack, and that a second bomb had been defused near the mosque. The reports could not be verified.

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Proof: Israeli Effort to Destabilize Iran Via Twitter

Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities -

1. They each created their twitter accounts on Saturday June 13th.
2. Each had extremely high number of Tweets since creating their profiles.
3. “IranElection” was each of their most popular keyword
4. With some very small exceptions, each were posting in ENGLISH.
5. Half of them had the exact same profile photo
6. Each had thousands of followers, with only a few friends. Most of their friends were EACH OTHER.

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Jones vs. Ross – Knock Out In The Third Round

. . . .The current Haaretz piece is headlined: “Why is Dennis Ross being ousted as Obama envoy to Iran?” The earlier headline was: “Was Dennis Ross ousted as U.S. envoy to Iran because he’s a Jew?”. If I remember correctly the earlier piece did not include the second paragraph of the current one which says Ross will in future “deal primarily with regional issues related to the peace process.”

We do not know why Ross was moved from that position. He should not have been put there in the first place because he is a. against talking with Iran, b. has never had success in achieving agreements in his earlier roles in the Clinton administration, c. has no experience on or with Iran at all.

Haaretz names several possible reason for this move. His open mistrust about talks with Iran, Irans alleged refusal to accept Ross in the negotiator role, his possible own dissatisfaction with his job and a rumored move of Ross to the National Security Agency where, a Haaretz source claims, he would work more directly under Obama.

The last claim sounds bogus to me. Ross does not have any experience as spy – at least not FOR the United States. The other ones are spurious too. Ross’ positions towards Iran was known before he was put onto the job. They can not be reason to now remove him.

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http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-election-wrap.html

. . .. It seems the neocons were too smart for their own good, pissed off the Obama administration with their scheming, and paid the price of losing “Dennis Ross: (Ross was probably headed out the door anyway, but the timing of his departure is telling). It was always completely preposterous that the Obama guy in charge of negotiating with Iran was the co-founder – along with Richard Holbrooke, whose job it is to wreck Pakistan – of an institute dedicated to nuking Iran.

From the most dependable newspaper in the world, the Telegraph:

“Mr Mousavi’s cancellation of the protest came as sporadic disturbances continued around the Iranian capital, and reports circulated of leaked interior ministry statistics showing him as the clear victor in last Friday’s polls.

The statistics, circulated on Iranian blogs and websites, claimed Mr Mousavi had won 19.1 million votes while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won only 5.7 million.

The two other candidates, reformist Mehdi Karoubi and hardliner Mohsen Rezai, won 13.4 million and 3.7 million respectively. The authenticity of the leaked figures could not be confirmed.”

Try to remember that this is the Telegraph, not the Onion (a far more reliable news source).

Meanwhile, back in the real world, pollsters explain how the final results are quite credible. Mousavi, a politician who had been out of power for twenty years, entered the race at almost the last moment. The poll showed he didn’t even come close to Ahmadinejad amongst his own ethnic group. Ahmadinejad is considered to be personally completely non-corrupt, while a major supporter of Mousavei, Hashemi Rafsanjani, is infamous in Iran for his corruption.

Mousavi is also good pals with Manucher Ghorbanifar. Remember the meeting in Rome with Ledeen in which they cooked up the trickery which led to the disastrous American attack on Iraq? Remember the Niger documents? The connections to corruption and to the neocons make Mousavi’s recent actions quite understandable. He never thought he was going to win. He was in the election from the get go as part of a neocon/Zionist plot to destabilize Iran and make the election ‘illegitimate’ . . . .

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Ahmadinejad

Some Dots You May Want To Connect

Some U.S. officials who have dealt with Ghorbanifar praise him highly. Says Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Pentagon on counterterrorism: “He is one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known.” Others call him a liar who, as one puts it, could not tell the truth about the clothes he is wearing. . . .

On or about November 25, 1985, Michael Ledeen received a frantic phone call from Ghorbanifar, asking him to relay a message from the prime minister of Iran to President Reagan regarding the shipment of the wrong type of HAWKs. . . .

The administration’s reluctance to disclose these details seems clear: the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a “regime change” agenda not approved by the president’s foreign policy principals or even the president himself. . . .

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Axis of Logic

The attempt to discredit the elections and cause instability in Iran look very much like a scheme we've seen before - directly out of the CIA playbook. We've seen this pattern in so many elections in Venezuela, for example, I swear that even the Chavistas would be disappointed if it doesn't reappear next time around. After all, a little drama does add some excitement in elections where consistent landslide victories are won by presidents like Chavez and Ahmadinejad. So here we go again - the old Langley one, two, three:

1. Groom an opposition candidate to run against the guy you hate, pay him well and line up your media to back him.


2. During the campaign, sell him as the savior of the bourgeois opposition who lost their money in the revolution. Use your own pollsters and media propaganda to convince his followers that they are going to win by a wide margin.

3. When your guy loses, scream "FRAUD!" It's akin to yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre, inflaming all those disappointed bourgeois counter-revolutionaries. Get them out on the street, setting fires, playing the victim, waving flags, ready-to-go placards, banners, women crying in front of CNN cameras and men yelling angrily into Christiana Amanpour's microphone. Only this time, they're ready to burn their own flag instead of the U.S. flag. I tell ya, it makes great TV for a western audience.

(Incidentally, don't take Christiana's reports too seriously. The Amanpours, like many Iranian expats, led a privileged life under the Shah of Iran and lost their ill gotten wealth as a result of the Iranian revolution in '79. Naturally, Christiana was very upset. Later, she married James Rubin, an arch-Zionist, and regained her status, good money and even some fame, this time as a CNN reporter in service to the empire.) . . .

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See also:

Golden Straitjacket ? . . . more like Golden Steak-knife . . . . through the ribs

Golden Straitjacket ? . . . more like Golden Steak-knife . . . . through the ribs

Thomas Friedman wrote ‘The Lexus and the Olive tree’ as an advertisement for globalisation. One of his main selling points was that all types of economic activity could be bundled and then sold (commoditised) to outside investors (or The Herd, as Friedman calls it). The results of this can be seen in the collapse of both Bear Stearns and Northern Rock.

A decent deconsruction of Friedman can be found here: The Anti-Friedman Page

In this page I suggest that Friedman's understanding of globalization is in fact extremely narrow, one-sided and misleading. His frequent and vociferous denunciations of those protesting against neoliberal globalization, and the arguments which Friedman advances in his book, are singularly ill-informed, poorly reasoned and, in a number of cases, demonstrably false.

Absent from Friedman’s advertisement was any in-depth discussion of military action in order to cause ‘regime change’ in favour of ‘the herd’. Of Course military action is not the only weapon in the Pentagon/Globalists arsenal these days. Due to the work of one Gene Sharp, who is partly responsible for the so-called 'colour revolutions' we've heard so much of over the last few years, non-compliant governments can by removed by a combination of repetition of phrases such as 'The current gov't are a bunch of election thieves' and organising student riots in favour of whatever political party offers the best deal for the predatory corporations.


Mr Sharp is 'a Senior Scholar' of the cleverly named Albert Einstein Institution

The Albert Einstein Institution is a nonprofit organization advancing the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflicts throughout the world.

We are committed to the defense of freedom, democracy, and the reduction of political violence through the use of nonviolent action.

Our goals are to understand the dynamics of nonviolent action in conflicts, to explore its policy potential, and to communicate this through print and other media, translations, conferences, consultations, and workshops.

The Albert Einstein Institution and Senior Scholar, Gene Sharp, have recently come under attack by certain writers and in speeches by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Which as far as I can tell means that they help topple gov'ts that don't want to follow the neo-liberal/Globalist agenda of selling the country's resources and infrastructure to what often turns out to be (funnily enough) the Corporation that offers the worst deal for the local inhabitants.

Here's a useful blog entry from What's Left about Stephan Zune's connection to the Institute employing Mr Gene Sharp:

Stephen Zunes and the Struggle for Overseas Profits

Another Center associate is Robert Helvey, whose book “On Strategic Non-Violent Conflict: Thinking about the Fundamental”, is promoted on the Center’s website. Helvey is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. military attaché to Myanmar (like Rodal’s, an improbable background for a budding Ghandi) who has been linked to anti-Chavez groups. Chavez has accused Helvey’s employer, the Albert Einstein Institution, of being behind an imperialist conspiracy to overthrow his government (4). Zunes says that “charges that…Bob Helvey” or the Albert Einstein Institution or the ICNC “are serving as agents of U.S. imperialism are totally unfounded” and that “the only visit to Venezuela that has taken place on behalf of any of these non-profit groups engaged in educational efforts on strategic nonviolence was in early 2006 when” Zunes “led a series of workshops at the World Social Forum in Caracas.” (5) Chavez, he says, has fallen for a conspiracy theory. These “individuals and groups” are not “plotting with his opponents to overthrow him.” (6)

But a Reuters’ report says Helvey was brought to Caracas in 2003 “by a group of businessmen and professionals to give courses to young activists on how to ‘resist, oppose, and change a government without the use of bombs and bullets.’” (7) Is Zunes unaware of this, or is he paltering with the truth?

Helvey’s dalliances with the anti-Chavez opposition came fast on the heels of “his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall” where he “briefed students on ways to organize a strike and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime.”

I recently watched a video of a presentation given by a guy by the name of Thomas P.M. Barnett. Barnett is more like the ‘real’ Friedman, or a more honest Friedman. He openly discusses all the ways in which the Gobalisers can use/abuse US military and Media might to induce circumstances favourable to the economic rape of any country foolish enough to think they might be better off deciding their own future.

A good deconstruction of Barnett's philosophy can be found here: 'A Post-Modern Nimrod'

Barnett is all things to all people. Given competing visions, he can affirm them all, as long as they are imperial and grand. He is bipartisan and non-sectarian. He believes that once his sheer clarity and strategic genius hit home, all Presidents and administrations of whatever party will carry out his program forevermore.

Barnett’s now famous map (PDF!) is the conceptual center of his book. His vision is more and more cited, and he may have created a following. This means big trouble, as we shall see. [3] In addition, Barnett means to create a new language whose very framing will force those who buy it to accept his grandiose prescriptions for “a future worth creating” (The Pentagon’s New Map, p. 5, his italics). The effect is somewhat like having Oliver Cromwell come back as a motivational speaker, who then divides his time between Pentagon briefings, Rotary Club meetings, and doing commentary on Fox News.......

Barnett doesn’t want to make war against a mere tactic – “terrorism” – he wants to crusade against his own abstraction, “disconnectedness,” in behalf of another one: “connectedness.” This may be the first “war” fought for-and-against verbal nouns. Along the way, globalization becomes so reified that it “has a past” and, evidently, a great future. A great deal can and must be sacrificed, it seems, to a particular reading of this (by now) irritating construct.

Thus: “Whether we realize it or not, America serves as the ideological wellspring for globalization. These united states still stand as its first concrete expression. We are the only country in the world purposely built around the ideals that animate globalization’s advance: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of expression. We are connectivity personified. Globalization is this county’s gift to history…. More important, to abandon globalization’s future to those violent forces hell-bent on keeping the world divided between the connected and the disconnected is to admit that we no longer hold these truths to be self-evident: that all are created equal, and that all desire life, liberty, and a chance to pursue happiness. In short, we the people needs to become we the planet” (p. 50, his italics).

Anyone interested should go here and search for ‘Barnett’. Then start reading and downloading. Plenty of videos and plenty to read.

Of particular interest to me was this video http://www.takeoverworld.info/vid/Barnett_160.avi (160mb, but smaller versions are available at the above link) of a presentation he gave, titled ‘Pentagon’s New Map - Blueprint for Action’ to what appeared to me to be an audience of Military/Industrial employees.