Internal, External Crises Sharpen in Iran
Iran has agreed to meet with the six world powers in early October. While they want to discuss Iran's nuclear research program, Iran is insisting that its activities are legal under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is signalling that it will be reluctant to do anything differently.
Eux.tv has video:
See Farideh Farhi's new essay, "Ahmadinejad's Nuclear Fallacy" for a canny explanation of what is going on in Iran on this issue.
Meanwhile, inside Iran, eminent cleric and thorn in the side of the Khomeini government, Husayn Ali Montazeri, on Monday branded Iran a "military-controlled" regime and called on the leading clerics to condemn repression. He argued that if all the major clerics (called maraji` or exemplars, i.e. people to be imitated in their views on the religious law) took on the regime, it would be forced to change.
Three of Montazeri's grandsons are said to have been taken into custody, in response.
And, Mehdi Karroubi (one of the presidential candidates) is refusing to back down on his allegations of prisoner abuse, even though they have been rejected by judicial authorities.
Both inside and outside the country, things are coming to a head.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/15/2009 01:06:00 AM
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3 Comments:
Farhi makes two fundamental mistakes. First, it is the reformists who are undermining Iran's nuclear rights by using it as a campaign slogan against Ahmadinejad, not vice versa. Second, the Khatami administration was no more willing to compromise on enrichment than the hardliners are today. In the past, the reformists were just as insistent on Iran's nuclear rights as the hardliners are now: As she notes in the article, it was the reformist Khatami administration that restarted Iran's suspended enrichment program, not Ahmadinejad (as widely misportrayed in the media.) All sides in Iran are in agreement that Iran cannot give up this right. It is simply a true fact that Khatami's suspension of enrichment backfired and resulted in yet more demands from the EU and a loss of 2 years of technical advancement, and Ahmadinejad is right in pointing out the naivety of the Khatami administration in believing that such comrpomises would have been met with equal gestures of goodwill from the US/EU. But even then, the Khatami administration made it quite clear that the temporary suspension was not to be interpretted as a willingness to give up enrichment at all. In fact, Iranians don't rely on Ahmadinead or Khatami to recognize their nuclear rights.
The anonymous comment argues based on the assumption that the issue is Iran nuclear rights, regardless of who is in control in Iran. As an Iranian who supports Iran rights in this regard, I do not want to trust Khamenie/ Revolutionary Guard/Ahamidnejad military Junta. Look at how they lie and deny most basic facts.
Montazeri, despite his exalted religious status is a man without much influence since the Ayatollah Khomeini himself dismissed him in the harshest and most insulting terms possible. See Khomeini letter.
http://www.baabeilm.org/khomeini/montezari.pdf
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