full-scale war between the US and Iran (1 Viewer)

Full text at linlk.

Imperialism finds new pretext for threats

Imperialism finds new pretext for threats

As Iranian workers went out in remarkable numbers for May Day, a new dispute over some small islands in the Gulf shows that despite apparent progress on the nuclear question a new source of tension has been found. Yassamine Mather reports.

A week can be a long time in politics, but in Iran it can seem more like a year.

Last week, as news agencies were reporting rumours of the regime’s possible retreat over its nuclear programme, the price of gold dropped on the Tehran exchange market - a clear sign of reduced tensions between western powers and Iran. The factional fighting of recent years also seemed to belong to the distant past, as figureheads of various factions of the regime, including those arch enemies, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the current incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended the meetings of the National Expediency Council. They even managed to smile for the cameras in a pre-arranged photo-shoot.

However, then came news of another conflict in the Persian Gulf - this time between Iran on the one side and Saudi Arabia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries on the other. Arab and US media reported that the Peninsula Shield Force, the military coordinating army of the GCC, had been carrying out military manoeuvres to “test harmony and coordination among ground, air and naval forces and their readiness”.

The military exercise was seen as a response to Iran’s continued occupation of three islands in the Gulf - the tiny Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb islets, near the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz, that was seized in 1971 by the shah after British forces left the region. Abu Musa, the only inhabited island of the three, was placed under joint administration in a deal with Sharjah, now part of the United Arab Emirates. They have since been a bone of contention with the UAE, which claims sovereignty over them.

While the dispute seemed to have been forgotten for most of the decades since, in the last two months the UAE has been mounting increasingly vocal demands for the return of their territory - with the backing of the GCC and the Arab League. This, of course, has brought an angry response from the Iranians, who vowed to “crush any act of aggression” and prompted a visit to Abu Musa by Ahmadinejad a few weeks ago. In Tehran the rumour is that even the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was not aware of the trip before it took place - on the eve of the international nuclear talks.
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/imperialism-finds-new-pretext-threats
Click to expand...
 
War against Iran has already begun, Sanctions and Malware are the oening acts of war against Iran. Yassamine Mather writes that those who condemn the crimes of the regime should also condemn the crimes of imperialism and its agents. Full text at link.

As the prospect of failure of the third round of talks between Iran and the 5+1 countries looms, the US-led soft war on Iran has been ratcheted up with the threat of further sanctions and the launching of a powerful computer virus targeting Iran’s nuclear research facilities. The virus has already spread to the commercial sectors, including the oil and banking industries. ...

Various ‘alternative governments’ and campaigns (for human rights, women’s rights and even workers’ rights) are being funded. Several websites, radio and TV stations have come up with proposals for workshops or a tribunal on the regime - fronted by a rainbow of the Iranian opposition, but backed by US/Canadian and EU regime change funds. A number of comrades at the Hands Off the People of Iran conference in April of this year raised the need to name and shame such groups. This article is an attempt to start a debate on the subject. ...

As we know from our experience in Hopi, political campaigns, publishing journals and bulletins, organising broadcasts, etc all cost money and clearly the weaker, more spineless sections of the Iranian left have been lured by the prospect of regime-change funding. In general the Iranian beneficiaries of regime change funds can be divided into two distinct categories:

1. Those who admit accepting foreign funds: mainly liberal and rightwing forces, such as monarchists, bourgeois republicans, former Revolutionary Guards like Sazegara and former Islamist greens (nowadays social democratic or liberal activists). These groups and individuals may publicise the source of their funding to ‘prove’ their importance, their relevance.

2. Those who receive such funds, but refuse to admit it, mainly because they still would like to masquerade as part of the left. These include sections of the Fedayeen Minority, Kurdish groups such as Komaleh, various splits from what was Iran’s Communist Party and a number of well-meaning, but dubious campaigns.

Those who supply the funds are often keen to unite this spineless ‘left’ into single campaigns alongside rightwing forces keen to brag about the source, and that is why even the most secret donations are eventually exposed. One such example is the International Tribunal for Iran,[3] which manages to unite sections of both the left and right, including those proud of their connections with organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (see below).

Hopi activists have been approached a number of times to lend their support to this campaign. In the past our response, in line with Hopi’s aims and objectives, has been: ‘We can only support campaigns against the Iran regime that have a clear policy in opposition to the US-led war drive. Can you give us the assurance we need - for example, by adding a clear statement against war and sanctions?’ This simple request has often been met with silence. In the meantime sections of the Iranian left - mainly comrades formerly associated with the Fedayeen Minority - have traced the funding for this tribunal and denounced its association with regime change from above. ...

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/regime-change-must-come-below
 
Full text at link.

Accepting funds from the CIA
Sat, 07/07/2012 - 17:38 | Brendan

Supporters of the Iran Tribunal have desperately been trying to defend their abandonment of working class principle. Yassamine Mather reports on the contortions

The Iran Tribunal - convened to put the Tehran regime in the dock for its massacre of 5,000-10,000 political prisoners in 1988 - took place in London over June 18-22. While it largely went unnoticed by the public in Britain, it caused uproar amongst sections of the Iranian left.

The tribunal was not the first well-financed attempt to divert the genuine anger of the Iranian people, and their hatred of the Islamic regime (in its many factions), towards dubious ends. Similar stunts have taken place before under the auspices of so-called NGOs - which turn out to be little more than fronts for the United States and the European Union.

The National Endowment for Democracy - which organised and paidfor the Iran Tribunal - is a case in point. The NED is in fact a not very covert operation run by the CIA. This is from an Information Clearing House interview with a former CIA agent: “The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation from the US Congress. The money is channelled through four ‘core foundations’. These are the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (linked to the Democratic Party); the International Republican Institute (Republican Party); the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity; and the Centre for International Private Enterprise (US Chamber of Commerce).”1

The NED’s NGO status provides the fiction that recipients of its largesse are receiving ‘private’ rather than US government money. The LewRockwell.com website explains this further:

“Washington’s formula for regime change underwent a makeover in the 1980s. In a bid to ensure US political and economic interests were safeguarded, CIA-backed coup d’etats ousted democratically elected leaders from Iran to Chile. In their place were brutal dictatorships and governments that committed heinous crimes against their people ... The concept of democracy promotion is simple: finance, train, and politically back local opposition forces around the world that support the American agenda.

“On this very subject Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell said, ‘We do this through surrogates and non-governmental organisation and through people who are less suspecting of the evil that may lurk behind their actions than perhaps they were before. Have we learned some lessons in that regard? You bet! Do we do it better? You bet! Is it still just as heinous as it has always been? You bet!’ So, while the goal remains the same, it is no longer the CIA, but the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partners spearheading the effort.”2

The NED is also heavily involved in Egypt. According to the Los Angeles Times, “In Egypt, the four US organisations under attack for fomenting unrest with illegal foreign funding were all connected to the endowment [NED]. Two - the GOP’s International Republican Institute and the Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute - are among the groups that make up the endowment’s core constituents. The two other indicted groups, Freedom House and the International Centre for Journalists, receive funds from the endowment.”3
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/accepting-funds-cia
 
Yassamine Mather examines the excuses used by ‘leftwing’ supporters of the Iran Tribunal and finds them wanting. Full text at link.

Iran: Sealed trains and class traitors
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/sealed-trains-and-class-traitors

Debates about the Iran Tribunal - convened to put the Islamic regime in the dock for its massacre of 5,000-10,000 political prisoners in 1988 - continues to occupy a prominent place in the publications and websites of the Iranian left, both in exile and to a lesser extent inside Iran itself.

In a sense it is true that, given the current situation in Iran - not least the disastrous consequences of what the US calls “comprehensive sanctions” - this is a small, irrelevant issue. After all, this week alone another 400 workers lost their jobs in Iran’s main car manufacturer, Iran Khodro, as a direct consequence of sanctions: Malaysia, under pressure from the US, pulled out of a contract. It is also true that sanctions are not the same as cluster bombs, but their effect on the Iranian working class can be devastating nevertheless.

The first round of the tribunal, which took place last month in London, attracted very little publicity and was indeed an insignificant event. So why is Hands Off the People of Iran devoting so much attention to it? We exposed the fact that it was organised and paid for by the CIA-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy as another way of building up the momentum for a military attack on Iran. Yet some conspiracy theorists are saying that Hopi chose to do so because we are “supporters of the Islamic regime” - or alternatively we are part of a sectarian plot to discredit sections of the Iranian left. Well, to deal with the second accusation first, the leftwing cheerleaders of this tribunal have made a pretty good job of discrediting themselves. ...
 
Mostly about Syria but it also covers the implications for Iran if Assad falls.

Syria: Islamists gaining ground

Yassamine Mather writes on the Sunni Islamist fundamentalist onslaught in Syria. An attack funded and backed by Imperialism. She analyses what has brought Syria to this situation and exposes the massacres carried out by the fundamentalists. Full text at link.

It may only be a matter of time before the Assad regime in Syria collapses and Sunni Islamist fundamentalists backed by the US/UK, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others are in power in Damascus. If that happens, the Shia states of Iran and occupied Iraq, which have backed Bashar al-Assad, would have lost a close ally. ...

Non-Arab Iran remains Assad’s main ally, but Assad’s downfall would create an upheaval that would shift the balance of power in the region in favour of Iran’s enemies: the Sunni Gulf states (the main supporters of the Syrian opposition). Tehran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, now the most powerful military and political force in Lebanon, would also be weakened. ...
According to Robert Fisk, Saudi Arabia and Qatar make no secret of the funds and weapons they are running into Turkey and Lebanon for the opposition.2 One of the two organisations that claimed responsibility for last week’s Damascus bombing is the Salafist Liwa Islam (the Islam Brigade). This group has already forbidden alcohol where it has gained a foothold. Sections of the western media, eager for Assad’s downfall, seem to be completely deaf and blind to the religious fanatic tendencies and political charlatanism of many of the forces.

While travelling in the region of Homs, a German journalist, Alfred Hackensberger, heard horrifying stories about the conduct of the rebels. He was told that in the city of Qusayr not only were Christians expelled from the town, but anyone who refused to enrol their children in the Free Syrian Army had been shot. Hackensberger repeats the story he had heard about an armed group stopping a bus: “The passengers were divided into two groups: on the one side, Sunnis; on the other, Alawis … the insurgents then proceeded to decapitate the nine Alawi passengers.”3 ...

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/syria-islamists-gaining-ground
 
Interesting update and analysis of the situation in Syria. Assad is a thug, I want to see him go but I don't want to see him replaced by fundamentalists.

America's Syrian Jihad

By Daniel McAdams

July 309, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- Anyone really paying attention to US policy in the Middle East these past several months must be wondering whether Washington has gone insane. US foreign policy under the triple threat of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton has gone to openly supporting what the German intelligence services (echoed in several prominent and panicked mainstream German media sources) have found to be predominantly al-Qaeda-backed terrorist attacks inside Syria. Americans can be forgiven for scratching their heads at the reality that the United States government is actively supporting in Syria what it has spent the last eleven years fighting just a few thousand miles away in Afghanistan.

As RT so poignantly puts it: ‘America’s Syrian friends and Afghan foes are same people’

When Syria's Christian defense minister was murdered last week by a suicide bomber using signature al-Qaeda techniques, the United States pointedly refused to condemn it as an act of terrorism. Can you imagine how the US would react if the US defense secretary and Obama's national security adviser were blown up by a radical Islamic suicide bomber? Would we not characterize it as terrorism?

On RT, which has been one of the sole voices of objective journalism and in-depth reporting, author and journalist Afshin Rattansi today makes this critical observation:

"As for the blowback for the United States, last time they went around arming these jihadists, sending in special forces and so forth, we got September 11th, 2001... As for the United States and NATO nations, one does not want to sectarianize it the way the international media do, but you never see on corporate stations anything about the Christians. The suicide bomb who killed the Syrian defense minister -- that guy was a Christian. I have a figure here that 50,000 Christians are fleeing from Homs because of American and European-backed Islamism in Syria". (emphasis added)

Is the US inviting another 9/11-style attack? Even the conspiracy theorists must have a hard time getting their heads around this mind-boggler.

Here is how the Vatican sees the US-backed Free Syrian Army's assault on Homs, Houla, Damascus, and now Aleppo *:

"The Vatican has received reports deemed credible that Sunni rebels financed by Qatar were attacking churches and ordering Christians to leave their homes.

"The reports, which stemmed from leading Catholic clerics, said the most threatened were Christians in rebel-held areas of Syria.

"'The picture for us is utter desolation,' Bishop Philip Tournyol Clos, a Greek Catholic cleric, said.

"The bishop, who holds the title of archimandrite, said a leading church in Syria, Mar Elian, has been destroyed. He said another church, Our Lady of Peace, was occupied by the rebels....

"The Vatican determined that some of the Sunni attackers were aligned with the Free Syrian Army, based in Turkey. An FSA commander, identified as Abdul Salam Harba, was said to have ordered Christians out of central Syria."

Islamic jihadists backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and, as we now know, supported by the US from a secret base in Turkey, have laid siege to the largest Syrian city, Aleppo, forcing the population to flee in terror. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta preposterously claimed today that the Syrian army's attempts to liberate Aleppo from the Saudi-backed Salafi extremists was "the nail in Assad's coffin." ...

* http://www.aina.org/news/2012072912019.htm

Full article at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32018.htm
 
Full text at link.

Iran: Stepping up the threats
Thu, 02/08/2012 - 16:05 |
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-stepping-threats

The upcoming US Presidential elections are only ratcheting up the threat of military action against Iran reports Yassamine Mather

It is mid-summer in an election year, so we should not be surprised by the hawkish statements regarding Iran coming from the US - not just from the Republican contender, Mitt Romney, but also the current US president. However, even when we take into account the timing, some of the statements Romney has just made in Jerusalem are more than worrying - and they have been matched by Barack Obama’s promises to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the despatch of bunker-buster bombs to the Gulf region.1

According to the Financial Times, in a keynote speech delivered in Jerusalem, Mitt Romney stated that the US has a “moral imperative” to stop Iran - the “most destabilising country in the world” - from developing nuclear weapons.2 Earlier in the day one of Romney’s advisors, Dan Senor, had said: “If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision”.3

In March 2012 Obama had criticised the “bluster and big talk” of Republicans candidates about a possible war with Iran: “This is not a game. There is nothing casual about it.”4 However, with the polls suggesting a tight presidential race,5 the US president has himself joined the “bluster and big talk” about Iran, the suggestion that the use of bunker-busters may now be on the agenda representing a real escalation. It is sad reflection of our time that the fate of 75 million Iranians and the possibility of military air raids against Iran’s nuclear facility might be decided by the rise and fall of Obama’s ratings in the polls. Added to this are reports that the United States is sharing with Israel full details of its possible military plans in relation to Iran.6

As far as Iranians are concerned, the war started on July 1, when a combination of new EU and US sanctions came into effect. The result has been large numbers of job losses, long queues for basic food, riots and demonstrations - no wonder Iranians are convinced that the confrontation with the west has entered a new phase. Sanctions cover not just nuclear, missile and military exports to Iran, but also oil, gas and petrochemicals, plus refined petroleum products; shipping in general; and banking and insurance, including transactions with the Central Bank of Iran - its director, Mahmoud Bahmani, commented that sanctions are “no less than a military war”.7

But it does not end there. On July 30, negotiators from the United States Congress and Senate reached an agreement regarding a new round of sanctions. The Senate Banking Committee’s Democratic chairman, Tim Johnson, promised to do all he could to make sure the legislation passed before the August recess: “… unless Iranians come clean on their nuclear programme, end the suppression of their people and stop supporting terrorist activities, they will face deepening international isolation and even greater economic and diplomatic pressure”.8 In addition, on July 31 Obama announced new measures to penalise foreign banks that help Iran sell its oil.9
Click to expand...
 
It could be argued that it is, in fact, somewhat less than a military war.

I'm pretty sure a military war has guns and whatnot.

Sanctions and military war are not the same thing, it could be argued.
 
Deadmanposting said:
It could be argued that it is, in fact, somewhat less than a military war.

I'm pretty sure a military war has guns and whatnot.

Sanctions and military war are not the same thing, it could be argued.
Click to expand...

Indeed but it could be argued that sanctions are war by other means. Especially when ordinary Iranians are suffering rather than the mullahs.
 
The last paragraph clearly has the Iranian policy analyst for Rand quoting US intelligence as saying no decision has being made in Iran on weaponising their nuclear program and giving his own opinion that weaponisation is neither inevitable or imminent.
 
We're back in James Bond territory.

Spy rock explodes near secret Iranian nuclear compound - report
http://rt.com/news/iran-spy-rock-nuclear-777/
Published: 23 September, 2012, 14:09

Iranian troops patrolling the perimeter of a secret uranium enrichment site have reportedly found a monitoring device disguised as a rock. The spy gadget exploded when disturbed, probably on a self-destruct trigger.

The incident happened last month, although no link to espionage operations was known before The Sunday Times newspaper broke the news. At the time Iranian Revolutionary Guards were checking terminals connecting communication links at Fordo, an underground site near Qom in northern Iran, the British newspaper reported Sunday citing intelligence sources. Iranian experts who examined the scene after the explosion believe that the spy device was capable in intercepting data from computers at the plant. ...
 
Full story at link.

Iran Tribunal: ‘Impossible to continue support’

Norman Paech, a prominent member of the German left party, Die Linke, has joined others in withdrawing his support for the Iran Tribunal after approaches from supporters of Hands Off the People of Iran, reports Tina Becker. This is an edited version of an article recently published on the website of the German magazine Hintergrund1

The Iran Tribunal continues to divide the Iranian left. Yassamine Mather’s articles in the Weekly Worker have been hotly debated in Iran, across Europe and the United States. Since she started to expose the links of the organisers to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a number of organisations and individuals have withdrawn their support. Other groups and parties have split over the issue.

It is therefore timely to take a closer look at the tribunal, its gestation, its corruption - and the fallout from Hopi’s scathing criticism.
Supportable aims

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of political activists in Iran were arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. Many leftwingers fled abroad and around 20,000 dissidents were murdered. The worst massacre was in the summer of 1988, when between 5,000 and 7,000 political prisoners were systematically executed in a matter of weeks, their bodies dumped in anonymous mass graves.

Since then, the relatives and former comrades of those killed have fought for justice. But how to do that in today’s world? That is the question that has sparked heated debates amongst the Iranian left. They are united in the view that a first, important step should be the publication of the details of the massacre. After all, the government in Teheran has never admitted these crimes and continues its cover-up. Many of those responsible remain in power.

“For many years, we have been fighting for an independent commission to examine the horrific murders and name the guilty parties. Our model is the Russell Tribunal, which was established by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1967 and which exposed very effectively the crimes committed by the US military in Vietnam.” says Yassamine Mather, who has been living in exile in London for almost 30 years and today is chair of Hands Off the People of Iran. After dozens of her comrades were executed in the early 80s, comrade Mather and other members of her organisation - Fedayeen (minority) - fled to Kurdistan to continue their struggle. From exile, she watched in horror as many more of her comrades and political friends were murdered.

Like other exiled Iranians, she initially supported the preparations for the Iran Tribunal. She even supplied it with evidence. An impressive range of international politicians and lawyers were won to the project - for example, from Germany Norman Paech, a prominent member of the leftwing party, Die Linke, and respected professor of law.

http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-tribunal-‘impossible-continue-support’
 
US removes Iranian terror group from its list of foreign terrorist organizations.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/081020...rtly-supports-mkos-terrorist-operations-oped/

These guys have been active for years within Iran and have long had lobbyists in Washington,the fact they were on such a list in the first place appears to only have been window dressing.

Also yesterdays excursion by a drone into Israeli airspace will not have gone down well over there,if it is,as speculated,a hizbollah drone,its a pretty big leap for them.
 
More on how sanctions are affecting ordinary people in Iran.

Iran: Sanctions mean war on the people

Hands Off the People of Iran remains true to its slogan, ‘No to imperialism, no to the Islamic regime’. Yassamine Mather describes the devastation and hunger inflicted on Iranians

If you want to find out what economic chaos looks like, forget about Athens or Madrid: Tehran is the capital to study.

In 2009-10 there were already signs of a serious economic crisis in Iran - low wages, mass unemployment, spiralling inflation, all helped along by privatisation. That was when we saw mass protests against fraudulent elections results, dictatorship and repression. Those demonstrations were suppressed and a number of factors, including the threat of war and the reformism of the self-appointed leaders of the green movement, contributed to the defeat of the protests.

Since then Iran has not been much in the news - until the protests of early October, when angry crowds took to the streets of Tehran. Sanctions have crippled the country to such an extent that for most Iranians day-to-day life is becoming impossible. It is true that not a single shot has been fired, but sanctions are indeed a form of warfare, imposing hunger and destitution on the population. And if the US presidential race remains close in these last days before the poll, the Obama administration could yet consider a military strike.

Of course, Iran’s economy is not crippled just because of sanctions. Decades of obedience to the International Monetary Fund have left the country with a privatised, corruption-riven economy. The gap between rich and poor is wider than at any time in living memory. Food and fuel subsidies have been abolished by Islamic clerics - to the applause of the IMF and World Bank. In other words, even without sanctions Iran would have had all the features of a third-world capitalist country suffering from the effects of the global economic crisis. But sanctions have made life so intolerable that people will tell you that hunger and poverty, combined with this constant fear of military conflict, is worse than war itself. ...
http://www.hopi-ireland.org/c/iran-sanctions-mean-war-people
 
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