View previous stories
	Letter From Tehran by CommonDreams / Human Rights Watch Iran   June 13, 2005   "Letter From Tehran: In Washington's Cross-Hairs", by Norman Solomon. (CommonDreams.org)   Washington keeps condemning Iran's government and making thinly veiled threats. But in Iran, many people are in the midst of challenging the country's rulers, in the streets and at the ballot box.   The June 17 election for president could be a turning point or a hollow spectacle - no one knows which - but the Bush administration is eagerly trashing the whole thing. ''The United States has not waited for the first ballot to be cast before dismissing Iran's presidential election as rigged,'' Agence France Presse reported over the weekend.   But Iran's election is not rigged. There is a fierce electioneering battle underway here, with some significant differences between candidates. Meanwhile, hindered rather than helped by the bellicose statements from Washington, courageous Iranian activists have begun a new wave of actions against the status quo of theocracy.   On June 12, in front of the University of Tehran, nearly a hundred courageous women sat down to demonstrate for human rights in a society where women literally and figuratively are compelled to sit at the back of the bus. ''Stop Bias Against Women,'' said one handheld sign. ''Stop violation,'' said another. And: ''Freedom.''   Across the wide vehicle-choked street, several hundred Iranian men and women of all ages quickly gathered to augment the demonstration, one of the only such public protests in recent years. ''Political prisoners should be free,'' they chanted. A sign declared: ''First Democracy, Then We Will Continue Living.''   Some of the Iranian people who most strongly oppose the government's theocracy are boycotting the election. Others will vote, primarily for Mostafa Moin, the most popular candidate at the reform edge of the spectrum. He's in sync with the current president, Muhammad Khatami, ''termed out'' after eight years in office. Khatami wasn't able to do much to undermine the power of highly conservative clerics. Yet many young people, who have faced extremely puritanical strictures, say that life in Iran has become a bit less stifling in recent years.   The widely respected icon and hack Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, positioned midway on the spectrum of candidates, has been making noises that are not only somewhat conciliatory toward the United States but also indicate that he favors a move away from current restrictive pressures on media and personal freedom. He might just be blowing smoke to appeal to the youth vote, but he clearly realizes that many in the nation's large population of young people are especially eager for such changes.   Several of the eight presidential candidates are hardline theocrats. Whether their outlook will prevail after the ballots are cast June 17 (or in the runoff scheduled for two weeks later if no candidate gets more than 50 percent in the first round) remains to be seen. So does Iran's path after this historic crossroads that could lead to more fundamentalist repression or progress for elements of democracy in Iranian society.   As I've learned more about what's at stake here for Iranian people, I've become more angry at the deceptive rhetoric coming out of Washington. When President Bush and his aides call Iran's presidential election meaningless, it is wishful thinking. Some of the Bush neocons have the delusion that they can overthrow the Iranian regime with plenty of missiles. But the real means for displacing Iran's theocratic rulers with democratic processes are grassroots efforts of the sort taking root in Iran right now.   Evidently, the Bush administration would prefer that Iran's presidential election be won by the most reactionary theocratic forces in the country. Many of Bush's policymakers have a fantasy that involves seeing Iran changed with military force. And a more reasonable Iranian president could make Bush's agenda-setting for warfare more difficult.   We should remember that the Bush team has much nicer things to say about the far-more-repressive government in Saudi Arabia. And a few weeks ago, Laura Bush - with her husband's endorsement - proclaimed Egypt's sham election ''reforms'' to be an inspiration. Iran's election process is very flawed, but it includes real aspects of democracy. Compared to the current Saudi or Egyptian electoral setups, Iran is a beacon of hope for the region.   The Washington officials who warn of Iran's nuclear intentions fail to mention that the U.S. government has been encouraging the spread of nuclear power plants for five decades. From an environmental standpoint, Iran (like all nations) is ill-advised to develop nuclear power. But there's no evidence it is anywhere near developing nuclear weapons. And the Bush administration, with a solid track record of winking at Israel's hundreds of atomic bombs and lying about WMDs in Iraq, is in no credible position to lecture about Iranian nuclear activities.   Bombast from the U.S. government helps to strengthen the hand of hardline Iranian ''theologues.'' For them, a missile strike against Iran would be a godsend.   While in Washington there are fervent dreams of a military assault on Iran, many people in Iran have boundless dreams of creating a society that embraces human rights. Americans who want to help them should challenge the dominant rhetoric of American media and politics that is now setting an agenda for war on Iran.   (Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy in the USA)   June 12, 2005   "Iran: Clerical Leaders foreclose Free Elections". (Human Rights Watch)   Iran’s discriminatory election laws and the Guardian Council’s exclusion of candidates prevents Iranian voters from freely electing candidates or standing for public office, Human Rights Watch said today ahead of Friday’s presidential election.   In a 17-page briefing paper, “Access Denied: Iran’s Exclusionary Elections,” Human Rights Watch details how election laws prevent candidates outside the ruling elite from running for high public office. Iran’s Guardian Council, an unelected body of 12 Sh`ia Muslim clerics and religious jurists, had interpreted these laws to exclude all women as well as all candidates whose views are critical of the current leadership.     “Iran’s elections for all practical purposes are pre-cooked,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division. “The Guardian Council appoints a few candidates, and then Iranians get to choose from this very restricted list.”     The Guardian Council enjoys arbitrary powers, known as “approbatory supervision [nizarat-e istesvabi],” allowing it to disqualify candidates even if they meet the discriminatory criteria stated in the election laws.     In practice, the Guardian Council has consistently approved only candidates that are “insiders” from within the ruling circle. More than a thousand candidates registered for the June 17 presidential elections, but the Guardian Council approved only eight, all of whom former or present government officials.     In this year’s presidential election, 89 women registered their candidacy, but none were approved. The Guardian Council has interpreted the criteria that presidential candidates be “religious or political personalities” to exclude women categorically.     All of the candidates on the presidential ballot are former or present government officials. These include former minister of higher education Mostafa Moin, Vice President Mohsen Mehralizadeh, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Ahmadinejad, former police chief Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen Rezai, former radio and television chief Ali Larijani, and former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karrubi.     “These elections are neither free nor fair,” Stork said. “Iranians cannot vote for candidates who represent alternative viewpoints from those of the ruling elite.”     As a party to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, Iran is obligated to allow its citizens to compete in elections “without unreasonable restrictions.” But the discriminatory qualification criteria of Iranian election laws, combined with the Guardian Council’s vetting of candidates, excludes most of those who want to compete for public office.     Iran’s election laws also discriminate based on religious belief in requiring that all candidates proclaim their loyalty to the religious doctrine of absolute rule of the Jurisconsult [velayat faqih motlaqeh], meaning that Islamic jurists hold ultimate political power. This doctrine, the rationale for the unelected position of Supreme Leader, is developed only among Shia Muslims. Even among Shia religious leaders, however, this doctrine is far from universally accepted.     Human Rights Watch called on the Iranian government to end discrimination against aspiring candidates based on their gender, religious belief or political opinion, and to revoke the Guardian Council’s authority to choose who can stand for office.
	The Iraq War: Realism Versus Neo-conservatism by John J Mearsheimer OpenDemocracy.net   19 - 5 - 2005   (The renowned American foreign-policy realist Hans Morgenthau (1904-80) opposed the Vietnam war. He would have regarded the neo-conservatives’ adventure in Iraq as equally flawed, says John J Mearsheimer of Chicago University).   Hans Joachim Morgenthau was one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century and one of the great realist thinkers of all time. Morgenthau, along with almost all realists in the United States – except for Henry Kissinger – opposed the Vietnam war. Their opposition came early, long before it became clear that the war was a lost cause; in fact Morgenthau was warning against American military involvement in Vietnam in the late 1950s.   Equally, almost all realists in the United States – except for Henry Kissinger – opposed the war against Iraq. Many supporters of that war are now having second thoughts, since it is becoming increasingly clear that American troops are stuck in an open-ended conflict from which there seems to be no exit. The realists, however, anticipated big problems before the war began; in this, they have been proved largely correct.   Taken together, these facts raise the obvious question: would Hans Morgenthau, the realist who opposed going to war in Vietnam, also have opposed the war on Iraq? We can never know for sure and it would be foolish to say with total certainty that Morgenthau would have opposed the Iraq war. Nevertheless, given his theory of international politics, his opposition to the Vietnam war and the parallels between the two conflicts, it is highly likely.   The neo-conservative case: military power   The dispute about whether to go to war in Iraq was between two competing theories of international politics: realism and the neo-conservatism that underpins the Bush doctrine. To understand the realist case against Iraq, it is necessary first to lay out the neo-conservative strategy that the realists were challenging.   Neo-conservative theory – the Bush doctrine – is essentially Wilsonianism with teeth. The theory has an idealist strand and a power strand: Wilsonianism provides the idealism, an emphasis on military power provides the teeth.   Neo-conservatives correctly believe that the United States has a remarkably powerful military. They believe that there has never been a state on earth that has as much relative military power as the United States has today. And very importantly, they believe that America can use its power to reshape the world to suit its interests. In short, they believe in big-stick diplomacy, which is why the Bush doctrine privileges military power over diplomacy.   This belief in the utility of military force explains in large part why the Bush administration and the neo-conservatives favour unilateralism over multilateralism. If the United States emphasised diplomacy over military force, it could not act unilaterally very often, because diplomacy by definition is very much a multilateral enterprise. But if a state has awesome military power and can rely heavily on that power to do business in the international system, then it will not often need allies. Instead, it can rely almost exclusively on its military might to achieve its goals. In other words, it can act unilaterally, as the Bush administration often did during its first term.   The key to understanding why the neo-conservatives think that military force is such a remarkably effective instrument for running the world is that they believe that international politics operate according to “bandwagoning” logic. Specifically, they believe that if a powerful country like the United States is willing to threaten or attack its adversaries, then virtually all of the states in the system – friends and foes alike – will quickly understand that the United States means business and that if they cross mighty Uncle Sam, they will pay a severe price. In essence, the rest of the world will fear the United States, which will cause any state that is even thinking about challenging Washington to throw up its hands and jump on the American bandwagon.   Before the Iraq war, realists would say to the neo-conservatives that if the United States threatens Iran and North Korea by putting them on the “axis of evil” along with Iraq, it will drive them to redouble their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Neo-conservatives would say to realists that Iran and North Korea will respond to the fall of Saddam by understanding that they are numbers two and three on the hit list, and will seek to avoid the same fate by surrendering. In short, they will jump on the American bandwagon rather than risk death.   Critics of the Iraq war would also say to the neo-conservatives that it would make sense to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before invading Iraq. Neo-conservatives would answer that an American victory in Iraq would compel Yasser Arafat to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The road to Jerusalem, they would argue, runs through Baghdad. If the mighty United States got tough with troublemakers in the Arab world, the Palestinians would read the writing on the wall.   Bandwagoning logic also underpinned the famous “domino theory”, which was a critical factor in the American decision to go to war in Vietnam. According to the domino theory, if Vietnam were to fall to communism, other countries in southeast Asia would quickly follow, and then countries in other regions would begin to fall under the rule of the Soviet Union. Eventually almost every state in the international system would jump on the Soviet bandwagon, leaving the United States alone and weak against an unstoppable juggernaut.   Some forty years later, the Bush administration thought that it could turn the domino theory to its advantage. Knocking off Saddam, the war party thought, would have a cascading effect in the middle east, if not the wider world. The Iranians, the North Koreans, the Palestinians, and the Syrians, after seeing the United States win a stunning victory in Iraq, would all throw up their hands and dance to Uncle Sam’s tune.   The neo-conservatives’ faith in the efficacy of bandwagoning was based in good part on their faith in the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA). In particular, they believed that the United States could rely on stealth technology, air-delivered precision-guided weapons, and small but highly mobile ground forces to win quick and decisive victories. They believed that the RMA gave the Bush administration a nimble military instrument which, to put it in Muhammad Ali’s terminology, could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”   The American military, in their view, would swoop down out of the sky, finish off a regime, pull back and reload the shotgun for the next target. There might be a need for US ground troops in some cases, but that force would be small in number. The Bush doctrine did not call for a large army. Indeed, heavy reliance on a big army was antithetical to the strategy, because it would rob the military of the nimbleness and flexibility essential to make the strategy work.   This bias against big battalions explains why deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz (a prominent neo-conservative) and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed out of hand (the then US army chief of staff) General Eric Shinsheki’s comment that the United States would need “several hundred thousand troops” to occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz understood that if the American military had to deploy huge numbers of troops in Iraq after Saddam was toppled, it would be pinned down, unable to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. A large-scale occupation of Iraq would undermine the Bush administration’s plan to rely on the RMA to win quick and decisive victories.   In sum, the RMA was supposed to make bandwagoning work, which, in turn, would make big-stick diplomacy work, which, in turn, would make a unilateralist foreign policy feasible.   The neo-conservative case: Wilsonian idealism   The idealist or Wilsonian strand of the neo-conservatives’ theory of international politics focuses on promoting democracy, which they believe is the most powerful political ideology on the face of the earth. Moreover, they believe that the world divides into good states and bad states, and that the democracies are the white hats.   Democracies have benign motives and are naturally inclined to act peacefully toward other states. Democracies only act in a bellicose fashion when the black hats, invariably non-democratic states, leave them no choice. Of course, they believe in democratic peace theory, which says that democracies hardly ever fight each other. Thus, if the United States could help create a world populated exclusively with democracies, there would be no war and we would have reached what Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history”. If every state in the system looked like democratic America, which is obviously a virtuous state, we would live in a world of all white hats and no black hats, which, by definition, would be a peaceful world.   Fukuyama thought we had reached the end of history in 1989 with the end of the cold war, and that boredom would be the main problem in the decades ahead. But 9/11 made it clear that the west was not going to be bored for the foreseeable future, because it faces a major-league terrorist threat emanating from the Arab and Islamic world, especially the middle east. The neo-conservatives reacted to this problem by arguing that the root of the problem was the almost complete absence of democracy in the middle east.   End of history logic, in other words, did not apply to this area because virtually no state looked like America. The solution was obvious: export democracy to the middle east, and hopefully to the wider Islamic world. Transform the region and make it into a zone of democracies, the neo-conservatives argued, and the terrorism problem would go away. After all, no state modelled on the United States would resort to terror.   Thus, the Bush doctrine emphasises the importance of spreading democracy, especially in the middle east. Iraq was the first major effort in this endeavour, although it could be argued that the war against Afghanistan was the initial step and Iraq was the second one. Regardless, Iraq was not intended to be the last step.   In the heady days after Baghdad fell on 9 April 2003, the Bush administration and its neo-conservative supporters made it clear that they intended to use the threat or application of military force to topple the regimes in Iran and Syria and eventually to transform the entire region into a sea of democracies. This was to be social engineering on a massive scale and it was to be done with a mailed fist.   To call the Bush administration conservative, at least in its foreign policy, is mistaken. It is pursuing a radical foreign policy, regardless of what one thinks of its merits. No true conservative would embrace such a grandiose policy. Moreover, the label neo-conservative seems like a misnomer when one considers the scope and ambition of the foreign policies that neo-conservatives prescribe for the United States.   Neither the neo-conservatives nor President Bush ever explained in detail how democracy was going to take root in the middle east, where there was hardly any history of democracy. Furthermore, little was said about how the United States was going to effect this transformation at the end of a rifle barrel. It was just assumed that democracy would sprout once Saddam Hussein and other tyrants were removed from power.   The American people, much to their discredit, never demanded an explanation as to how the United States military, which has never been particularly good at nation-building, was going to do massive social engineering in a foreign and probably hostile culture.   The bottom line is that the neo-conservative theory of international politics that moved the invasion of Iraq has a power-based strand which emphasises big stick diplomacy and bandwagoning logic, and an idealist strand that calls for spreading democracy across the middle east and maybe even the entire globe.   Hans Morgenthau and the realist critique of neo-conservatism   What, then, is the realist critique of this neo-conservative theory, and how might Hans Morgenthau have reacted to the arguments for and against the Iraq war?   Realists do not believe that we live in a bandwagoning world. On the contrary, realists tend to believe that we live in a balancing world, in which, when one state puts its fist in another state’s face, the target usually does not throw its hands in the air and surrender. Instead, it looks for ways to defend itself; it balances against the threatening state.   Thus, realists predicted that Iran and North Korea would not react to an attack on Iraq by abandoning their nuclear programmes, but would work harder than ever to acquire a nuclear deterrent so as to immunise themselves from American power. Of course, this is exactly what has happened over the past two years, and there is no sign that either of the remaining members of the axis of evil is likely to cave into the Bush administration’s threats. Simply put, we live in a balancing world.   It is also worth noting that the neo-conservatives expected America’s allies in Europe to change their tune after Iraq and support the Bush doctrine. Once the United States demonstrated the power of its sword, the weak-kneed Europeans would have to accept the fact that they live in a world that operates according to American rules and nobody else’s. So far, the French and Germans do not appear to be following that script.   As far as Morgenthau’s views on balancing versus bandwagoning are concerned, the critical issue is how he thought about the domino theory, which is based on bandwagoning logic and which was at the heart of the debate about whether to fight in Vietnam.   Morgenthau, not surprisingly, thought that the domino theory was hooey. Like all realists, he understood that we live in a balancing world and that the fall of Vietnam would not have a cascading effect in southeast Asia, much less across the entire globe. It is hard to believe that he would have accepted the neo-conservatives’ claim that invading Iraq would cause America’s other adversaries to start dancing to the Bush administration’s tune.   On the idealist strand of neo-conservative theory, the argument is even stronger that Morgenthau, like almost all contemporary realists, would have opposed the Iraq war. Realists tend to believe that the most powerful political ideology on the face of the earth is nationalism, not democracy. President Bush and his neo-conservative allies largely ignore nationalism. It is simply not part of their discourse. For them, the emphasis is constantly and emphatically on democracy, and they believe that invading countries to facilitate the spread of democracy is an attractive option.   Realists, by contrast, think that nationalism usually makes it terribly costly to invade and occupy countries in areas like the middle east. People in the developing world believe fervently in self-determination, which is the essence of nationalism, and they do not like Americans or Europeans running their lives. The power of nationalism explains in good part why all of the great European empires – the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and the Russian – are now on the scrapheap of history.   There are other cases which demonstrate that nationalism quickly turns liberators into occupiers, who then face a major insurrection. The Israelis, for example, invaded Lebanon in 1982 and were at first welcomed as liberators. But they overstayed their welcome and generated an insurgency which drove them out of Lebanon eighteen years later.   The American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan fit the same basic pattern, although the American and Soviet learning curves were a bit steeper than the Israeli. In short, realists thought from the start that it was foolish in the age of nationalism to think that the United States could invade and occupy Iraq and other countries in the middle east for the purpose of altering their political systems in ways that would make them friendly to America.   There is little doubt that Morgenthau saw nationalism as a potent political force and that, more than any other factor, it drove his opposition to the Vietnam war. Many argued during the Vietnam years that the fight was a war between democracy and communism that the United States could not afford to lose. Morgenthau rejected this view, and argued that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong (the guerrilla forces in South Vietnam) were motivated mainly by nationalism, not communism, and that they would invariably view American troops in their midst as colonial occupiers whom they would fight hard to expel.   Morgenthau understood that if the United States committed large-scale military forces to Vietnam, it would face a major-league insurgency that would be extremely difficult to beat. It is natural to conclude that he would have understood that this same basic logic applied to Iraq, and thus would have opposed the Iraq war as fiercely as he opposed the war in Vietnam..   (John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago).   Click on the link below to access the rest of this article. Visit the related web page
	View more stories