Iran Election on The Huffington Post

Jose Antonio Vargas: Why Twitter is the Most Popular Word of 2009

2009-11-30T14:02:07Z

Of course Twitter is the most popular English word of the year.

Yesterday, the Global Language Monitor declared the San Francisco-based micro-blogging site as the top English word of 2009. In a decade marked by the growth of most everything Internet-related, this marked the first time a Web company has earned that distinction. MySpace (founded in 2003), Facebook (in 2004) and YouTube (2005) never made that spot in their early years.

But Twitter's achievement also underlines a sobering reality -- one that President Obama, a BlackBerry addict, hinted at in a town hall meeting in Shanghai two weeks ago. Asked via the Internet if the Chinese should be able to use Twitter freely, Obama responded: "Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone."

For all the buzz (our "first Twitter Christmas," the New York Times wrote Friday, noting how retailers like Best Buy use the site); all the magazine covers ("How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live," read a headline in June's Time magazine); all its undeniable impact in all aspects of life, from politics to entertainment (remember country-pop princess Taylor Swift thanking her Twitter followers during her speech at this year's MTV Video Music Awards?), Twitter is not mainstream.

Not mainstream in terms of size; since this summer, there's been report after report that Twitter's membership has peaked, not anywhere near the 300-million strong membership of Facebook.

Not mainstream in terms of usage; though many live, swear and exist through Twitter's 140 character limit, Twitter's retention rate, as been widely reported, is somewhere around 40 percent. (A caveat: that doesn't take into account people who use Twitter through third-party applications and mobile phones.)

Not mainstream in terms of omnipresence and ubiquity; Twitter ain't Google.

In other words, Twitter is not for everyone -- not yet, at least. Many people are confused by it. (If I had a dime for every time a friend or a relative who's not glued in front of his/her computer all day said to me, "I still don't get this Twitter thing!"). Others don't see how it relates to their everyday lives. ("So why do I need this again?") Broadly speaking, and with many exceptions, Twitter is still largely the province of the world's digital elites and early adopters, who from the streets of Tehran to the fragmented Republican Party are getting their message out, whatever that message may be, unfiltered, unedited, be it photos, videos, opinion or just plain news. And the message will get out. And the message will inevitably spread. It's no coincidence, by the way, that the top English words of the past few years, as surveyed by Global Language Monitor, are news-related. Last year, the top word was "change," in reference to Obama's improbable and winning campaign. Three years before that, in 2005, it was "refugee," in reference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In 2000, it was "chad" -- as in the hanging chads of Florida, which played a central role in the tight race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Twitter, after all, is about having a voice. Here in the U.S., it may mean tweeting about this or that party. Abroad, in authoritarian regimes such as Iran, it means tweeting about the fight for democracy.

"Twitter has gone in the way of YouTube. At first, people thought YouTube was silly and weird; they didn't know how to YouTube and what a YouTube channel was. Now YouTube is synonymous, the industry standard, for online video -- for everyday people to watch, upload and share videos," Scott Goodstein, the text messaging expert who ran Obama's social networking presence during the campaign, told me. "Twitter is going through the same process. Twitter has become synonymous with quick, short opinion and perspective -- coming from anyone, going everywhere."

The Web is flat. And in a world made smaller by the Internet and new technologies, Twitter forces us to become each other's witnesses, one tweet at a time.

That's why Twitter, only three years old, is the most popular English word of 2009.

Iran Expands Efforts To Stifle Opposition

2009-11-24T09:37:06Z

DAMASCUS, Syria -- After last summer's disputed presidential election, Iran's government relied largely on brute force -- beatings, arrests and show trials -- to stifle the country's embattled opposition movement.

Ramin Pourandarjani's Death Raises Suspicions

2009-11-18T16:17:15Z

BEIRUT — An Iranian doctor who went public with reports of tortured protesters he treated at Tehran's most feared detention facility dies, amid conflicting reports of a heart attack, a car accident or suicide – raising opposition accusations that the 26-year-old was killed.

Revelations that protesters detained in Iran's postelection crackdown were tortured, some to death, were a deep embarrassment to the country's clerical rulers. Dr. Ramin Pourandarjani was pressured to change the death certificate of one of the most well known victims and later spoke to a parliament commission investigating the abuse, opposition Web sites reported.

Adam Elkus: Reflecting on Iran, Social Media, and Change

2009-11-12T12:26:52Z

Viewed through Western eyes, the information-enabled 2009 Iran protest movements were an irresistible force pitted against a brittle and hapless regime. Such a view overemphasized the role of technology in what was fundamentally an old-school social uprising. Still, some authors see the failure of the Iranian protest movement as a sign of technological hubris. A more realistic view of social movements and information politics is needed. Social media, while important in enabling mobilization and organization, is not necessarily decisive.

In 1995, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt coined the term "netwar" to describe the Mexican Zapatistas, a local guerrilla group that utilized emerging technologies and globalization to draw foreign human rights groups, non-governmental organizations, and activist groups into their ultimately successful struggle. Four years later, a decentralized collective of networked activists utilizing creative street tactics caught the Seattle police by surprise in the 1999 "Battle of Seattle." Since then, many have overestimated the power of networked social movements, especially social media-enabled groups struggling against repressive regimes. Arquilla and Ronfeldt understood what some contemporary tech-boosters did not: information-age struggles share many principles of industrial-era action.

To use a military analogy, even Twittering activists still must observe time-honored principles such as mass, main effort, and unity of command. A poorly chosen center of gravity or a lack of sufficient power massed at the decisive point can doom even the most well-organized endeavor. The Mexican Zapatistas, for example, understood that Mexico's center of gravity was the prestige of the ruling administration, and applied pressure accordingly in the right places. The Iran protests' center of gravity was political-military regime elites and clerics. Clerics beginning to tire of the regime's mismanagement constituted the decisive point. Unfortunately, not enough dissident Iranian clerics rallied to the side of the protesters, allowing the regime to eventually crush the demonstrators.

The chief challenge of any networked organization is to transform information into real-world power. Many take the trite phrase "information is power" as an article of faith, but information alone is insufficient to create material or political power. A green Twitter profile with hundreds of thousands of foreign followers is not the stuff of revolution. Lenin's dexterous political maneuvering and ruthlessness created the Russian Revolution, not the favorable press of foreign journalists such as John Reed.

Failure to effectively transform information into power enables centralized opponents to gather enough material might together to stall, suffocate, or outright eliminate embryonic social movements. Decentralization can give networked movements an initial tactical advantage against slow-moving centralized forces but it takes discipline, organization, and sequencing to exploit tactical successes. The ephemeral quality of "flash mobs" can work against networked movements as well, as digital assemblages can disintegrate as hastily as they emerge.

It is also worth pointing out that the 2008 Obama campaign, usually cited as a prominent digital success story, employed many of the classical principles of social organizing that the President learned firsthand in his days as a community organizer. Technology was employed to network grasssroots organizations into the national campaign.

Networked social movements are still in a immature stage. But as information campaigners grow more experienced, skilled, and above all else pragmatic the quality of digital campaigns is sure to improve. Perhaps tyrants will come to fear Twitter. But until then we should take a realistic view of networked social movements' mobilizing power. Social media adds another dimension to political conflicts and activism, but not a necessarily decisive one.

Iranian Memoir By Freed Prisoner Haleh Esfandiari

2009-11-12T08:54:04Z

In Emin Prison

Claire Messud
The New York Review of Books

"My Prison, My Home:
One Woman's Story of
Captivity in Iran"
by Haleh Esfandiari.
Ecco, 230 pp., $25.99

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.

In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest--a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother--she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.

In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. "My Prison, My Home" is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling--the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring--a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.

In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)

Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:

While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.

Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.

Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but

even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."

Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s--although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's "Shah of Shahs" (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs" (2005)--and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.

Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.

In a moving aside--and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October--Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:

By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.

In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini--who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France--gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."

While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:

More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).

For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."

In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime--many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution" (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.

Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:

These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.

Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.

This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game--destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.

The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:

He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.

Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.

Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"

More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":

It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly in-dependent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color--orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.

The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.

Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.

Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's '1984'") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.

The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:

My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....
Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....
I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.

In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"--all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.

Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like--in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.

Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books--not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").

Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.

Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" (2003):

They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.

In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications--such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"

She fought back with rage and defiance--"I knew I must not let them break me"--and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:

Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sinister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.

This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed--can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?

For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.

Claire Messud's most recent novel is "The Emperor's Children." Her earlier novels include "When the World Was Steady."

Read more at The New York Review of Books.

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3 Journalists Freed By Iran

2009-11-07T21:10:03Z

TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian authorities have released three journalists who were among more than 100 people arrested during pro-government and opposition street demonstrations this week, the country's official news agency reported.

One of the reporters, Farhad Pouladi, is an Iranian who works for Agence France-Presse. The other two are foreign reporters, but the report by the IRNA news agency did not identify them or say for whom they work.

Neda's Mother Recalls Daughter Four Months After Brutal Killing Captured World's Attention

2009-11-05T11:28:38Z

(CNN) -- The night before she was killed on the streets of Tehran, the woman the world would come to know simply as Neda had a dream. "There was a war going on," she told her mom the next morning, "and I was in the front."

Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey On Using Twitter For Social Change

2009-11-03T21:17:29Z

In case you haven't noticed, Twitter has made headlines recently as a platform for passionate people to effect social change.

In April, the president of Moldova ordered a recount of votes in their recent election, following a Twitter revolution that resulted in mass protests.

During the Iranian elections, when news on what was happening in the country was hard to find, people around the world used Twitter to get news out, and show solidarity with the protesters.

Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter, which now boasts 18 million users.

Impact caught up with Dorsey at the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in Mexico City in mid-October. The conference was designed to inspire leaders to effect nonviolent world change through the use of technological tools. We asked Dorsey about the role of Twitter as a force for good in the world and he shared some tips on how to use the service to create a social movement, even if you don't have millions of followers.

Impact: How can people use Twitter more effectively for social change?

JD: I think the biggest thing is supporting each individual update more, getting away from [Twitter] being a social network and focusing on individual tweets - you can create a whole movement from that. Right now we have the hashtag, which was invented by our users, but it's still a little bit cumbersome. But we've seen that tool have a dramatic effect on how people organize and it serves a particular event or a particular moment and then disperses when it's no longer necessary. The hashtag could then become a full-fledged Twitter account which people can follow permanently. I think making that transition [to concentrate on the value of individual tweets] in an easy way would be very, very helpful.

Impact: You have said that it is not important how many followers you have, but how you can effectively use Twitter hashtags. How does somebody who doesn't have a lot of followers on Twitter but is interested in promoting a cause use the platform to effectively do that?

JD: It's really about focusing on the content, making sure the message you want to put out there is simple, direct and genuine. It should express passion and love for whatever you are talking about, because when people see that, it is very engaging and inspiring. It sounds silly, but it's really that simple. Just focus on the message and keep at it: it will be discovered at some point. We see many examples of that today, and over the past year. I think it's really difficult to overcome the notion that you need to have 20,000 followers to say anything meaningful, and you're not going to say anything meaningful until I have 20,000 followers. Because what's the point of that? The way you gain people and lead is to express yourself right now. No matter who is listening right now, if you start talking, people will eventually listen if it's something that resonates with them.

Impact: What cause are you most passionate about?

JD: I wouldn't necessarily focus on any specific one. My position is really to build technologies that speak to any cause; that's what I want to do all the more of. There's a number of causes that are particularly relevant to me, that resonate with me. One is what the Grameen Bank did, and Kiva -- creating the ability to give micro-loans to people, so they can worry less about the risk and start their own business or project and be independent and self-sustaining. That just speaks to me personally, because that's how I like to operate in the world, and I love to see other people do the same thing. I think the UN refugees organization has done dramatic things with these technologies. That's something we don't see it in the news: the number of people who are moving and transitory between two countries and don't have a solid place to call home, people who have been uprooted for political reasons or natural disasters and now have to make a new life. What is that like, and how can we help those people and shed light on the challenges they are about to face or currently facing?

Impact: What you're talking about are complex issues that will take a sustained effort to help solve. How can Twitter, a technology based on catching a person's short attention span, help mobilize movements that take patience and sustained effort?

JD: I believe you can use that short attention span to your advantage. You can use the limitations, the constraints on the technology to your advantage by constantly exposing snippets of these various causes and concerns in the world. You can constantly talk about them, exhibit a lot of passion around wanting to build things and work on projects that help answer these issues and solve them. But the biggest thing for these longstanding issues is to bring awareness that they're still around. Maybe they're not affecting people in the same way but they're still affecting people in a new way, and this new way might be more detrimental to society than before. I think if we generate a lot of awareness and discourse, and we generate a lot of empathy and understanding of how other people live, that goes a long way to minimize conflict. That way we can have a healthy and positive discourse instead of always being in the dark and up in arms because we don't understand where the other person is coming from or why they asking these things of us.

Let's shift the conversation for a minute. Miley Cyrus and Trent Reznor left Twitter very publicly and very upset. How do you respond to something like that and what do you think were their reasons for leaving?

I think it's really unfortunate. Both were frustrated with the number of imitators of their personae, who were creating significant, negative damage. A lot of people have seen these fake accounts and believed that they were following the real person. Part of that is just something that is going to exist, but part of that we can try to solve with technology. The company has created the "verify accounts" program, where our customer service staff actually verifies that these are the right accounts, and you can see these badges so you know you are looking at the right account, not something that has been set up for ill intent. I would hope that we could inspire more patience around our development of those [technologies] and that we can have open conversations about the challenges of solving those issues, because they are always going to be with us.

After hearing from so many activists all over the world, do you have any ideas on what new tools or ideas that can help solve the world's big problems?

I think there's a lot missing. I think we can think a lot more about mobile and SMS technology as a way to bridge the gap between those who do not have access to the Internet and electricity. There are portable cell phone towers positioned in villages and I think a greater understanding of what the mobile world brings to us and how we can utilize that is very important. In that same light, these devices contain information on where they are and who is using them and the conditions around them. My iPhone has an accelerometer in it, it can tell when there's an earthquake or when I'm moving or running. There are so many sensors in the world that are underutilized right now and could present so much data, we can create some very interesting visualizations. I would definitely look specifically at what's happening around mobile phones and location to use those tools to really create awesome products.

How would you advise people to take action, based on your own experience? How can they find a passion and follow it?

Travel would be the number one thing. Travel not just around the world, but in your own neighborhood as well: travel around your city, walk instead of driving or taking the bus. You'll discover so many things that need innovation and need someone to care for them.

Once you stumble upon something that you're passionate about, get started. Put something out there, get it out of your head, take it away from a concept to something you can see in front of you. We can't really do anything until we have something in front of us. Until we're writing words and we see them on the paper, or we're building code, or we're painting a picture, we can't iterate on it or determine if it's something that will sustain our interest or the interest of others. Perhaps it's something that just needs to be put away and closed, or learned from, or integrated into another idea. The only way to get through these things is to see them and play with them and allow others to play with them and iterate, iterate, iterate. Until you have that, you're just getting lost in thought and you can convince yourself that this is the best system in the world, but there's nothing to show for it. The hardest step is getting started, and it's the most important one.

Follow @jack on Twitter.

Reza Pahlavi: Iran: With whom to engage?

2009-11-03T16:02:30Z

Last week, I had the opportunity to address over forty members of the United States Congress with the goal to encourage their recognition of the importance of engaging the Iranian people and their ongoing struggle for human rights and democracy.

I began my remarks by asking, "If the U.S. is to continue to assert engagement as the path forward in the case of Iran, whom precisely should the engagement be with?"

The answer: the "Green Movement" of the Iranian people.

If the U.S. supports the Iranian people in their struggle for democracy -- for human rights and liberties -- it will empower their movement, catalyzing their success. And in so doing, the West will find its solution to nuclear proliferation: democracy itself. It is only in a democratic Iran where the international community will find a trustworthy, transparent and accountable counterpart.

I am and have always been opposed to any military action against my homeland. But it is also clear that any diplomatic efforts deprived of appropriate pressure points would be toothless, thus incapable of producing the desired results. In hopes of providing U.S. lawmakers with tangible guidance on Iran, I offered a three-pronged combination of measures that offers the best prospects for long-term stability: (1) a more vociferous support for the Green Movement's legitimate calls for human rights and democracy; (2) targeted sanctions against the individual financial power of the regime's leadership; and (3) serious commitment, support and work to increase communications into Iran, out of Iran, and within Iran.

Similar to my discussions with members of the French National Assembly, the British House of Commons and the European Parliament, I detailed this strategy by urging the Members of the U.S. Congress to embrace their greatest ally against nuclear proliferation: the Iranian people. The Iranian people have loudly and unequivocally vocalized their demands for a democratic system of government, which by definition will be transparent, responsible and accountable. Solidarity from world leaders sustains the momentum they need in their campaign for the establishment of freedom and democracy at home, and peace and stability in the region. I cannot imagine any achievable sanctions that could create pressures commensurate with what the people of Iran have already demonstrated.

I, along with most Iranians, was quite disheartened to learn that earlier this month, the U.S. State Department had denied all funding to a human rights center, as well as an online Farsi-English journal of democracy, both of which focused on Iran.

It is simply counterintuitive for America -- at this critical moment in Iran's history -- to deflate, through such actions, the hopes and aspirations of the Iranian people. It is exactly what the clerical regime wants: a confidence builder in its usage of an iron fist against a citizenry that has so courageously withstood the blows of wielding clubs, chains and untold rape and torture.

As Iranian democracy activists remind us, "There is a reason protesters hold signs written in English on the streets in Iran. They are not just practicing their language skills!"

As I confer with international opinion and policy makers, I regularly make the emphasis, as I did with members of the U.S. Congress, on the importance of targeted personalized sanctions against the regime's leadership and individual private financial fiefdoms, rather than the Iranian people. The imposition of smart sanctions that specifically target the assets of key decision makers, and the means of the Revolutionary Guards to oppress the people, can prove effective. The critical goal, however, must be to weaken the financial power of the oppressive forces inside Iran. Clearly, if the West is to enforce new sanctions, those sanctions must be intrinsically tied to the Green Movement's outcry for freedom.

As with so many fronts in this modern-era, at the end, it is all about communications. I encourage investment in technologies that increase communication with the Iranian people. America in particular needs to increase the available mediums of dialogue with the Iranian people by strengthening the ability of the Iranian people to access news and information and to overcome the electronic censorship and monitoring efforts of the Iranian regime.

This renewed dialogue would allow the world to demonstrate its solidarity with the democracy-seeking Iranian people. It would also improve the accuracy of the information received from Iran. But perhaps most importantly, improving these technologies would allow the Green Movement within Iran to communicate, organize and mobilize much more efficiently.

Finally, I regularly remind my audiences that history has taught us that the democratic process must come to fruition as a result of an internal discourse. In the meantime, the international community must stand in solidarity with the people of Iran through a palpable commitment to their struggle.

By supporting the Iranian Green Movement and the people's legitimate quest for human rights and democracy; sanctioning the financial strength of Iran's leadership; and improving communications technologies, we shall provide a solution that not only works for the free world, but also for my compatriots, and even perhaps the region at large.

Tehran: Embassy Occupation Anniversary May See Fresh Protests

2009-11-02T15:38:43Z

A new showdown looms in Iran this week, as the regime and its intrepid opposition gear up for what may be their biggest street confrontation since the protests that followed the disputed June 12 presidential election. The latest face-off is scheduled for Wednesday, when Iran commemorates the 30th anniversary of the U.S. embassy takeover by radical students. In an ironic twist, however, instead of the traditional festival of America-bashing, students across the country are being summoned to mark the event with a protest against their own government.

Robert Amsterdam: Lula's Red Carpet Welcome for Ahmadinejad

2009-10-29T14:16:52Z

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, affectionately nicknamed Lula, comes as close to being a global rock star as a politician can get. But like any towering celebrity, there are some troubling developments behind all the glamour.

With less than a year to go before finishing his second term in office, Lula is riding a wave of popularity that is virtually unprecedented in Latin American history (75-80% approval ratings). The Brazilian economy, with the swagger of its BRIC status, has swelled over the past decade and survived the crisis, championed by many investors to be the top emerging market for growth over the short term (5% GDP growth speculated for this year). The President himself has been beatified to almost-sainthood in several films, including the latest high-budget biopic entitled "Lula, Son of Brazil," which has many guessing that he's aiming to become Secretary General of the United Nations. All that, plus he just got them the Olympics and the World Cup.

Why then, with so much going for him and his country, should he make such controversial choices in his friends? Lula's increasingly warm embrace of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including an official state visit to Brazil Nov. 23-26, is causing many of his fawning admirers to rub their eyes in disbelief.

For those of us who enthusiastically support Brazil and its people, culture, and economy, the logic of the relationship with Iran is perplexing. There is no overlap in values, for example. This week Iran executed five people (including women), while another 135 juvenile offenders are on death row. Second only to China in capital punishment, Iran has also issued death sentences to five people now accused of fomenting unrest during the post-elections protests - a number which is likely to grow. Brazil, on the other hand, has proudly outlawed capital punishment since 1889, the second country of Latin America to adopt such a law.

The low level of trade between the two countries fails to provide an explanation either. Iran doesn't figure among the top 20 trade partners either for purchasing Brazilian exports or sending imports, and although Ahmadinejad has excitedly said that relations with Brazil have "no limits," even oil minister Azizollah Ramezani has stated that it is too far away to be a potential market for hydrocarbons (though oil and gas technical expertise is an area of interest).

The professed area of mutual interests is in the nuclear sphere. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki describes Brazil as holding a "common position" on rights to nuclear energy, while on Brazil's behalf Lula has repeatedly voiced his opposition to sanctions.

However, the true motivations behind the Brazil-Iranian relationship have very little to do with these statements. For Brazil, the elephant in the room is Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose own jovial relations with Iran and the purchase of $6 billion in Russian arms are prompting his neighbors to take action toward containment. What better way to procure information on what Iran is doing with its new "factories" in remote parts of Venezuela than strike up a competing relationship - which could also be the logic of Brazil hijacking the Honduran situation from Chávez's control by housing ousted President Mel Zelaya in their embassy.

During a visit this month to Brasilia, I was repeatedly told that the government believes that Chávez can be most influenced by keeping him close. Hence the hasty vote today to confirm Venezuelan ascension to Mercosur despite their failing to meet conditions set forth in the Treaty of Asunción. Many would call Brazil's decision to incorporate Chávez into Mercosur as naïve, but at the time of this writing President Lula was already boarding a plane for a coincidental visit to Caracas to celebrate Venezuela's entry at a presidential dinner.

Though there are other explanations for Lula to pursue his Iran policy (his South-South agenda, generalized anti-American goals, or bolstering Brazil's diplomatic clout in the UN), the balancing strategy with Venezuela is the most convincing. He feels that he has to create these alliances as measures of security to catch up with Chávez, which demonstrates once again that the Venezuela's activities cannot just be dismissed as harmless mischief-making by Washington. Testifying before Congress this week, Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas, underscored this threat and commented that Brazil is "playing with fire" in bringing Iran into the region.

Venezuela is not only having an impact on foreign policies of neighboring states (Ecuador's Rafael Correa is in Moscow today), but also in the arms race Chávez has kicked off. Lula recently commented, "Everyone knows Brazil is a peaceful nation, but we need to be able to show our teeth if anyone wants to mess with us."

As for Iran's interest in Latin America, their thinking goes that the further they are able to penetrate into Washington's backyard, the safer they become. By increasing the costs of intervention, the Latin American strategy provides a staging ground for a real or imagined threat to the United States, which aims to have a dissuasive impact on the push for sanctions and diplomatic pressure. To boot, after a questioned election, it is always good to receive the congratulations of the global leader of the responsible left.

At the moment it is hard to say whether Lula, despite his celebrity and admirable achievements, is in over his head with Iran. Brazil is an impressive growing power, and one that has changed dramatically in the recent past, so it is understandable that its assertion of international leadership is fraught with challenges and inconsistencies. Soon the country's influence will be too big to simply shrug off issues of human rights and democracy without costs to its reputation.

This may already be happening. The most callous and frightening thing Lula has said with regard to Iran came shortly after the June elections, when demonstrations erupted and the police truncheons came down violently on the heads of protesting students. Quoted in the Brazilian media, Lula described these events as nothing more than the tears of poor "losers." That is not a hopeful message for those brave young men and women who now face show trials and execution for having attempted to change their country. Coinciding with the sports analogy, Fabio Barretto, the director of the latest glowing Lula biopic, was recently quoted saying, "In Brazil, there are no losers ... only people who keep trying until they succeed."

It would be nice if Lula's own story could mean something more outside of Brazil.

Mehdi Karroubi, Lone Cleric, Emerges to Defy Iran's Leaders

2009-10-23T08:55:20Z

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia A short midlevel cleric, with a neat white beard and a clergyman's calm bearing, Mehdi Karroubi has watched from his home in Tehran in recent months as his aides have been arrested, his offices raided, his newspaper shut down. He himself has been threatened with arrest and, indirectly, the death penalty.

Maziar Bahari Tells Of Ordeal In Tehran Prison

2009-10-22T14:07:50Z

For day after day, month after month, following his imprisonment in Iran on June 21, documentary filmmaker and NEWSWEEK correspondent Maziar Bahari did not see the face of his interrogator. Bahari, 42, was blindfolded or faced a wall as the accusations and questions--often it was hard to tell the difference--kept coming at him. And always the interrogator told him the same thing: "No one on the outside cares about you. Everyone has forgotten you." Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Kian Tajbakhsh, Iranian-American Academic, Gets 12 Years For Election Unrest

2009-10-20T08:55:43Z

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran ignored appeals by Hillary Rodham Clinton and even rock star Sting and sentenced an Iranian-American academic to 12 years in prison Tuesday for his alleged role in anti-government protests after the country's disputed presidential election.

The sentence for Kian Tajbakhsh was the longest prison term yet in a mass trial of more than 100 opposition figures, activists and journalists in the postelection turmoil.

Iran Suicide Bombing Could Be Bad For Obama

2009-10-19T16:32:09Z

Sunday's suicide terrorism attack that killed at least five commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps could have an impact far beyond the Islamic Republic's restive southeast border with Pakistan.

Iran Suicide Bomb: Senior Revolutionary Guard Commanders Killed In Iran Bomb

2009-10-18T03:36:43Z

TEHRAN, Iran — A suicide bomber killed five senior commanders of the powerful Revolutionary Guard and at least 37 others Sunday near the Pakistani border in the heartland of a potentially escalating Sunni insurgency.

The attack – which also left dozens wounded – was the most high-profile strike against security forces in an outlaw region of armed tribal groups, drug smugglers and Sunni rebels known as Jundallah, or Soldiers of God.

MAZIAR BAHARI RELEASED: Iran Frees Newsweek Reporter On Bail

2009-10-17T19:01:17Z

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran released a foreign Newsweek reporter on bail Saturday almost four months after he was arrested following the country's disputed presidential election, as embattled opposition leaders promised to press on with their campaign against the country's rulers.

Maziar Bahari, a dual Iranian-Canadian citizen who was released after posting bail of 3 billion rials ($300,000), is among more than 100 prisoners put on mass trial as part of the government's attempts to silence opposition protests that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's June 12 re-election was fraudulent.

Amb. Marc Ginsberg: Russia "Nyet!" and China "Bu Shi!" to Tougher Iran Sanctions

2009-10-16T15:16:22Z

Iran's anti-democratic and repressive regime is a member of a fraternal club of other like-minded anti-democratic and repressive regimes which include Russia and China. They do stick together. And friends they are indeed!

In one bad week for us good guys, both Russia and China brushed aside diplomatic entreaties from the Obama administration and in a one-two punch rejected calls for tougher economic sanctions to thwart Iran's nuclear weapons development program.

Despite noble efforts to downplay Russia's "nyet", Secretary of State Clinton left Moscow empty-handed after her meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in her quest for a more united front against Iran's nuclear ambitions. And just to make sure Washington got the message Premier Putin (just coincidentally in Beijing for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Council) made sure Mrs. Clinton was sent a reminder who really pushes the "reset" button. Putin took the ol' proverbial Russian boot off his foot and pounded it for good measure... "It's premature" to threaten sanctions against Tehran," Putin stated flatly.

And Chinese Premier Wen Jia Bao followed Putin with a "Bu Shi" ("nyet" in Mandarin) when he extolled China's growing energy and trade ties to Iran to a visiting Iranian Vice President. More "Middle Kingdom" diplomatic subtelty for sure, but the message was just the same -- don't expect China to turn the economic screws on Ahmadinejad's nuclear aspirations.

Frankly, I am puzzled by Russia's and China's calculations.

At a time when both Russia and China are trying to readjust their diplomatic bearings with Washington (Obama is about to make his first visit to Beijing), why not join the West for a while in toughening sanctions against Tehran to forestall a possible military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities? There is a chance (maybe not a great chance, but a chance nonetheless) that Iran's leaders are more likely to seek a diplomatic solution knowing that they face international approbation against their illicit nuclear program and that they must now deal with a united Security Council lined up against them even if universal economic sanctions have a Swiss cheese quality to them.

Given the stakes and sense of urgency, one may conclude the Russians and Chinese foolishly prefer a military showdown between the West and Iran than a diplomatic solution.

And to what purpose? Surely a nuclear-armed Iran will destabilize the entire Middle East.

Yes, tougher economic sanctions would inflict more misery on Iran's population. But that may put more pressure on a regime already deemed illegitimate by millions of Iranians.

It's not that tougher economic sanctions themselves will humble the mullahs. Iran has mastered the art of evading U.S. sanctions through sophisticated third country smuggling and the like. However, eventually stricter sanctions will take their toll on Iran's ruling elite -- making it more difficult for the Revolutionary Guards to maintain their income and raising the cost of doing business even on the black market of sanctions busters. And there is nothing that will anger Iran's population more than being further isolated internationally because of the destructive policies of its rulers.

And what are we really talking about here? A year or two of reducing trade with Iran until the full effects of universal sanctions have a possible intended effect? If China is so concerned about losing its access to Iran's crude oil supplies, surely something can be done to assuage Beijing that it will not run out of oil. And as for Russia, the Kremlin will have a helluva time trading with Iran for many months to come if Iran's transportation and military infrastructure are taken down in an attack. And Russia's two way trade with Iran is a pittance (less than $3 billion) when compared to China's two way trade with Iran ($21 billion).

In fact, the dirty little secret about Iran's trade ties is that while China is Iran's largest trading partner, in rank order, the next largest trading partners are Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Italy and Germany -- hmmmm -- all allies of the U.S. Russia is not even in the top 5! What is Washington, Paris and London going to do about these offenders of a potential diplomatic solution?

Although Iran has strained to show more flexibility when cornered by irrefutable evidence of cheating when its secret Qum nuclear facility was uncovered, there is no evidence that it has completely ceased its uranium enrichment program. And nothing that it offered in Geneva a few weeks ago suggests otherwise.

The United States, Great Britain and France have decreed a December deadline to Iran or it will face a new set of economic sanctions. But without Russia and China helping to close the economic noose around it, Iran probably will calculate that the price for defying the West is worth the cost -- unless a credible military option is on the table.

But even the possibility of a military confrontation may not dissuade Tehran given the regime's view that an attack on Iran may have the unintended effect of uniting the Iranian people behind their discredited rulers even if it means losing its nuclear facilities (albeit temporarily). I can just hear those demonstrators back on the streets of Tehran yelling "Death to the Great Satan!" instead of "Down with the Dictator!" A conundum indeed!

Evelyn Leopold: Iran Talks: Shadows of Iraq, Legitimacy of Regime

2009-10-16T10:32:09Z

Two elephants are and were in the room during negotiations on Iran's nuclear ambitions: the rigged elections that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power and the shadow of Iraq in overestimating Tehran's weapons of mass destruction.

Obviously the Iraq and Iran situations differ. Iraq's Saddam Hussein did have chemical and biological arms, Scud missiles and designs for a nuclear arms program, most of which were neutralized by U.N. inspectors in the early 1990s. Sanctions worked at first and then served to impoverish Iraq. But most weapons were gone by the time of the 2003 US invasion, a subject of heated analysis and criticism.

How far Iran is from making a bomb is still in dispute as there are good faith differences in analyzing intelligence, even among Western allies. But that Tehran has nuclear ambitions is more than a fantasy since it kept its program a secret for 18 years and then revealed it to the UN International Atomic Energy Agency , the IAEA, only six years ago. Still, exactly what Iran -- which insists its program is for peaceful purposes -- is planning or has achieved is not fully transparent.

UN Inspection due at Qom

The IAEA will inspect Iran's newly-disclosed enrichment plant near the city of Qom on October 25. The Iranians informed the IAEA of the covert project, probably suspecting that the United States was about to blow the whistle. President Barack Obama has joined allies in talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions, as was the case with the Bush administration. At the same time he warned Iran to come clean about its nuclear program, which Western nations fear is a cover to build nuclear arms, or face further sanctions.

Any sanctions by the UN Security Council will have far more effect than if Washington and Western allies step up their own embargoes. But Russia, backed by China, has not agreed, at least until negotiations with Iran continue. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told UN diplomats last month and then announced publicly his opposition to tough measures at this time.

Most experts believe that Western intelligence agencies, especially the United States, are more rigorous and cautious in analyzing data because of the Iraq episode. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says war would only slow, not end, Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. And President Obama does not threaten war. Instead he said at the end of the Pittsburgh summit of G-20 countries last month:

When we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite. That's not the preferred course of action. I would love nothing more than to see Iran choose the responsible path.

Justifying June Elections

Yet the nuclear issue and the legitimacy of the Iranian government after the June elections are being kept separate. At the UN General Assembly gathering last month, few world leaders publicly mentioned that the Iranian government survives by violence, militia and Revolutionary Guards, who not only put down demonstrators but hold some lucrative government portfolios. (The violence was criticized by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon).

Both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, went out of their way to justify the elections.

"Our nation has gone through a glorious and fully democratic election, opening a new chapter for our country in the march towards national progress and enhanced international interactions," Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly. He said Iranian voters "entrusted me once more with a large majority."

Questioned at a UN news conference by this reporter on the impact of the June election on the nuclear talks, Mottaki was adamant that Ahmadinejad had won fairly despite "international propaganda."

The election in Iran last June was one of the most glorious presidential elections ever held in the Islamic Republic of Iran...Election regulations were made so that no one could change the outcome of elections... Rioters were arrested and the innocent were released.

Of course that wasn't all. Mottaki said the facility at Qom was the "only case that is under construction." Both men had been on a charm offensive with the American press, craving recognition from the Obama administration and regularly complimenting the US President for advocating change.

But Ahmadinejad could not resist repeating his anti-Semitic remarks, prompting walkouts during his General Assembly speech, by alluding to a supposed worldwide Jewish conspiracy:

It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the US, to attain its racist ambitions.

Ahmadinejad says he wants to resolve the nuclear issue (the UN Security Council has forbidden Tehran to enrich uranium to a level of uranium that could be used for nuclear bombs) but only in the context of a broader understanding. Diplomats believe this would include a pledge not to call for "regime change."

Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that Iranian leaders may want prolonged talks to gain legitimacy at home and abroad.

"There is a danger that we send a message to the Iranian people that we don't care about them," he told NPR. "Many Iranians are saying, 'Don't legitimize this illegitimate government.'"

On Monday, Iranian officials meet in Vienna with delegations from the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Russia and China, the first of two October meetings. While Iran has refused to curb uranium enrichment, it agreed "in principle" to have its low-enriched uranium processed in Russia and France for use in a reactor that makes isotopes for cancer cures. (Such low-grade uranium could be enriched if it stayed in Iran.).

However, Iran's stance is till ambiguous. Will it move towards UN demands or draw out negotiations to head off sanctions?

Iran Cleric: "God's Fury" Will Be Unleashed If Female Governors Allowed

2009-10-15T11:40:48Z

A top hardline Iranian cleric said on Thursday that "God's fury" would be unleashed if Iran appoints women as governors of some provinces, as was raised as a possibility by a minister last week.

Melody Moezzi: Leave Punishing Iran to Iranians

2009-10-13T15:04:58Z

By pushing Russia to consider the option of greater sanctions on Iran in her meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may be endorsing a policy that will end up biting her in the back of her pantsuit. Apart from the fact that Moscow is unlikely to support such a policy given its strong trade relations with Tehran, there's also the issue of effectiveness. If the past 30 years have taught us anything in Iran, it is that sanctions are not an effective way to change the so-called Islamic Republic of Iran's behavior, nuclear or otherwise.

The idea that Iran poses a genuine nuclear threat to the international community is highly misguided at best. For one, even if Iran had nuclear weapons, which no one has confirmed, it would have no more than a handful. According to the Federation of Atomic Scientists, Israel has roughly 80 nuclear weapons and the United States, its chief ally, has over 9,000. The massive retaliation that any attack on Israel would undoubtedly produce would surely obliterate Iran -- dare I say, wipe it off the map. As a result, much like the recent mass trials of opposition leaders, journalists and protesters, any nuclear weapons that Iran might have are purely for show.

As the world recently witnessed at the UN General Assembly, contested President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks a good game. But for all his theatrics, Ahmadinejad has about as much independent power as a skilled stagehand. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei runs the show in Iran. He controls the armed forces and were anyone to push the button, it would be Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad. And while Khamenei is happy to taunt Western powers with claims of nuclear capabilities, he's not about to send a formal invitation to their military forces by bombing Israel.

Iran is not agreeing to further meetings with world leaders and the International Atomic Energy Agency solely to make friends or compromises. It is doing so on a massive PR campaign. By convincing the world that the greatest threat Iran poses is a nuclear one, the Iranian regime succeeds in promoting the false notion that its own greatest threat is not domestic turmoil, but rather foreign retaliation in response to its alleged nuclear weapons program. Still, no matter how hard the regime tries to convince the world otherwise, it's clear that Iran's strongest adversary today remains within its own borders, in the form of an increasingly frustrated, determined and defiant Iranian opposition movement.

Foreign sanctions or military attacks would thus prove counterproductive in that they would only strengthen the regime by punishing the Iranian people for the actions of their illegitimate rulers. And the Iranian people represent by far the greatest hope the world has in replacing the allegedly Islamic Republic of Iran with a truly democratic one.

Iran has been under sanctions for the past 30 years, and its behavior has not changed as a result. What has changed, however, is the social and economic condition of the Iranian people. Inflation and unemployment rates are embarrassingly high, and by all accounts, the regime could care less.

The current Iranian regime has far more to fear from its own people than it does from any foreign powers. More than any outsiders, Iranians know exactly where their government's soft spots lie, and they are fearlessly and relentlessly aiming directly at them.

The opposition's chants of "Allah-u Akbar" and particularly its ability to create its own symbolic martyrs, such as Neda Agha-Soltan and Sohrab Arabi, are proof of this fact. By appealing to Islam and the strong Shi'a emphasis on martyrdom to point out how painfully un-Islamic the allegedly "Islamic" Republic of Iran has become, the Iranian people are striking precisely where the regime is most vulnerable. Green is not only the color of the pro-democracy movement. It is also the color of Islam, and yet another example of how the "Greens" are successfully using Islam to fight a regime that falsely claims to be promoting it.

Thus, the Iranian opposition is shaking the very foundation of the current regime by pointing out its failure to defend generally agreed-upon Islamic values such as justice, equality, courtesy, compassion and non-compulsion in religion. Similarly, the opposition is also drawing attention to the government's violation of it's own Constitution, not just international law, in its brutal post-election crackdown on protesters, journalists and opposition leaders.

By attacking their government's claims to Islam and republicanism, the opposition is destabilizing this regime from within to make way for a better, legitimate government in the future. If an attack were to come from the outside, however, it could destroy both the government and the people of Iran, like a deadly round of chemotherapy that kills both the cancer and the patient in the process.

Sanctions and military attacks will not weaken the regime. Rather, they will only weaken the regime's greatest enemy to date: the millions of angry young Iranians who constitute over 70 percent of the current population and who are sick of being told what they can and can't say, do, print or wear. The Iranian people will paralyze this regime faster and more effectively than any foreign military or economic retribution ever could.

If the most famous of this year's Nobel Prize winners truly wants to see a safer, more peaceful and less militarized world, he would be wise to stop harping on Iran's possible nuclear armament and focus more on American disarmament. In this respect, Secretary Clinton could achieve far greater gains for the prospect of peace on earth by discussing the disarmament of the two greatest nuclear powers and threats on our planet while they're both in the same room. With a combined 25,000 nuclear weapons to their names, it would do the U.S. and Russia some good to commit to a little domestic clean-up of their own before pointing fingers and waging threats abroad.

Iran Sentences 3 To Death In Post-Election Mass Opposition Trial

2009-10-10T16:04:56Z

TEHRAN, Iran — Three defendants in Iran's mass trial of opposition figures accused of fueling the country's postelection unrest have been sentenced to death, an Iranian news agency reported Saturday.

Two of them were convicted of membership in a monarchist group seeking to topple Iran's Islamic Republic and restore a monarchy, the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported, quoting judiciary official Zahed Bashiri Rad.

David Elliott: As Obama Scores an Iran Breakthrough, Congress Fumbles

2009-10-07T15:28:28Z

As the pressure built early last week for President Obama to forgo diplomacy with Iran in favor of imposing new sanctions, Iran's top opposition leader posed a piercing question to the world. "Which one of [Iran's leaders] can be expected to care about the agony their behavior imposes on people?" Mir-Hossein Mousavi asked. By belying the bankruptcy of the alternatives, his question underscored the importance of President Obama's diplomatic engagement with Iran.

The wisdom of this approach was reinforced again on Thursday, when the United States secured an agreement that will significantly reduce Iran's capability to produce a nuclear weapon. Even at this early stage, President Obama's diplomatic strategy has already achieved more positive results than the Bush administration's bellicose policy did in eight years. Yet by that evening, the U.S. Congress disregarded Mousavi's advice and Obama's diplomatic success, imposing new sanctions against Iran that, if anything, will only hurt the Iranian people.

Mousavi pointed out the obvious problem with most sanctions being proposed, saying they will "mostly hurt the poor" and will not help Iran's opposition. Indeed, it's even worse than Mousavi thinks. The sanctions Congress passed Thursday are a baby step toward imposing the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), which would in all likelihood help the Ahmadinejad government.

IRPSA would expand unilateral sanctions and target companies exporting refined petroleum to Iran. The goal is to put pressure on Iran, but which "Iran" will we be hurting - the Iranian government or the Iranian people? Just like in the United States, Iran's poor, middle class, and elderly will bear the brunt of any gas price shock. Between its domestic production and smuggled petroleum, the ruling clergy and Revolutionary Guards will surely find a way to keep their gas tanks full and heat their homes. But if the sanctions really work, many of the very same Iranian people that members of Congress spoke so highly of this summer will be left out in the cold when winter hits.

An embargo on refined petroleum poses further problems. It would provide the excuse the Iranian government wants to eliminate burdensome petroleum subsidies and place the blame on the United States. Iran has to import roughly one third of its domestic gasoline consumption at market prices and then resell it at a subsidized price of about 40 cents per gallon. These subsidies cost the government of Iran a tremendous sum - between 10 and 20 percent of GDP, annually. For this reason, the Iranian government wants nothing more than to eliminate these subsidies, but it has been stymied repeatedly by popular opposition. Ironically, an embargo would enable them to eliminate these subsides, freeing up cash for the government to spend elsewhere, such as building more nuclear centrifuges or expanding the IRGC.

The Iranian people have already come out into the streets, risking everything, to protest against the government. If the west imposes sanctions because Iran refuses to halt its nuclear enrichment program, which has the overwhelming support of the Iranian people, who will the Iranians blame for the sanctions? Most will blame the United States, and the opposition will be put on the defensive. Rather than focusing solely on its demands for an end to the injustices being carried out and the restoration of the peoples' rights, the opposition will be forced to spend its time and energy proving its loyalty to the embattled nation.

Fortunately, some in Congress are now working on a better option. Rather than pushing for indiscriminate economic sanctions like IRPSA, they are pursuing the best path to pressuring the Iranian government: empowering the Iranian people to more effectively stand up for their rights and imposing targeted sanctions against Iranian government officials.

Taking the Iranian government on at its weakest point - human rights - these lawmakers will soon introduce legislation that sanctions Iranian government officials guilty of human rights abuses while eliminating roadblocks that undermine the development of a vibrant civil society in Iran. There are targeted sanctions the US and its allies can impose, such as freezing bank accounts, imposing travel bans on government officials and military commanders, and sanctioning companies that provide censorship technology to Iran. Iran's leaders will care a lot more when they discover they can't access their European bank accounts - like the $1.6 billion account Britain froze this summer - than they will if their own people suffer.

The plan will also help empower the Iranian people by ensuring that they have free and unfettered access to the Internet and communications tools, and by fostering greater cooperation between the peoples of America and Iran.

Just like June 12 and the weeks that followed changed our notions about the Iranian people, it's time for Congress to change its approach on Iran. It's time for Congress to stand with the Iranian people, not against them.

Kiri Westby: Refusing To Be Silenced: Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi to Speak in Boulder (Part 1)

2009-10-02T12:03:25Z

There is a lot of talk about Iran these days.

From the highly criticized, and widely protested, re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this past June, to international condemnation about the country's "nuclear proliferation activities" (which Iranian authorities repeatedly deny), Iran is at the center of the debate on stability in the Middle East.

So where are the voices of Iranian women in the debate?

One woman who has been speaking out is Iran's 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, and she will be speaking here in Colorado on Friday Oct. 9th, 7pm at Naropa University in Boulder (click the link to buy tickets in advance).

Shirin Ebadi, the first Iranian and only Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has come out strongly against discrimination and injustice in her country, despite great risk to her own safety. In 2000, she spent a month in solitary confinement after defending the family of a student killed by police during protests.

Ebadi believes that because decisions in Iran are being made behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny, then neglecting democracy is a lot more dangerous than owning a nuclear weapon. A bold statement for her belief in the power of democracy, and one that goes hand-in-hand with her condemnation of the Iranian government's crackdown on election protesters.

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry has repeatedly summoned her husband and her brother for interrogations and ordered them to silence her. They told her husband that they could track her down wherever she was in the world. But despite the threats she continues to speak out, saying "Naturally the Iranian Government doesn't want the world to know what's happening in Iran, so it's my duty to inform as many people as possible,"

For years I worked for Urgent Action Fund for Women's Human Rights, during which I met dozens of women human rights defenders who, like Ebadi, risked everything to stand up for truth and justice.

I often wondered if I myself would have the courage to risk my life for my belief in universal human rights.

In 2007, I got the chance to find out when I was detained in Tibet by Chinese authorities for staging a pre-Olympics Tibetan Freedom protest on Mt. Everest. Five of us spent three days in detention being interrogated and threatened. It has taken years to deal with the trauma that single event caused for my family and I. I don't think I could ever return to China and challenge that regime again, not if I knew I would face much worse the second time.

Shirin Ebadi has been denounced by the state-controlled media in Iran and charged in abstentia with conspiring against the state. She has been traveling since the elections, after which she was advised by colleagues not to return. But she plans to go home in a couple of months, daring the regime to arrest the only Iranian to win a Nobel Prize. If not imprisoned, she has said she will fight to secure justice for the families of those killed in the crackdown.

It takes serious courage to choose to return to her homeland to face further imprisonment ... and before she does, she is coming to Colorado!

This is a rare opportunity for all of us to hear from a leading Iranian peace advocate about her vision for human rights and women's rights in Islam, and she will not be alone. Notable Muslim women, pioneers in the fields of conflict resolution, peace-building, community organizing, human rights, interfaith dialogue, media and Islamic thought will join Dr. Ebadi in a daylong symposium on Sat. October 10th, from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

If you can't make it, I will be covering it for the Huffington Post and will bring you the highlights in Part 2 ... though there may be too many to fit into a blog because Shirin Ebadi and her colleagues are bold and brave and they have a lot to say about women's leadership and activism in the Muslim world. Will you be listening?

When asked recently if she will stay silent on her return to Iran, Dr. Ebadi replied, "Never. If nobody stands up to them they will act even worse."

Join me,

Kiri Westby
Change-Maker/Rule-Breaker/Story-Teller

Featured contributor to Ed and Deb Shapiro's new book, BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, with forewords by HH Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman.

Melody Moezzi: Ahmadinejad Kicks Diversion Efforts into High Gear

2009-09-23T11:07:34Z

In the lead-up to his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is up to his old tricks. And sadly, the global community seems to be falling for them.

Ahmadinejad has managed to divert attention from his disputed re-election in June and the human rights abuses his government has carried out since those elections by publicly engaging in what appears to be his favorite pastime: bashing Israel and denying the Holocaust.

Last Friday, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Tehran to show their continued opposition to Ahmadinejad and what many consider a stolen election.

The protesters made it a point to call Ahmadinejad out on his hypocrisy on Friday, which marked Quds Day, the Iranian government's annual show of solidarity with the Palestinian people. In speaking out in support of human rights for Palestinians while continuing to deny them to his own people, Ahmadinejad provoked the largest opposition protests since mid-July.

Amid the greatest unrest Iran has seen since the Islamic Revolution, the world's attention is not on the false arrests, show trials, torture and illegal detentions in Iran. Rather, the central issue that the international community has chosen to focus on, apart from Ahmadinejad's persistent holocaust denial, has been that of the Iranian government's nuclear capacities.

Given the fact that the US and Israel combined have at least a thousand times as many nukes as Iran could potentially be hiding, the possibility of a nuclear attack by Iran, no matter how misguided its president, is highly unlikely.

What is likely, however, is a continued crackdown on opposition leaders, activists and journalists inside Iran. The international community would be better served to concern itself more with these internal Iranian developments than with uranium enrichment today because the best hope for a non-nuclear Iran is a free Iran.

And the greatest assets the world has in ridding the country of hard-liners such as Ahmadinejad are the Iranian people themselves. Foreign intervention, military or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the potential power of the Iranian people to bring down this regime.

The best way for the international community to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian regime is to refuse to fall into Ahmadinejad's trap. The world has a lot more to gain by focusing on the plight of the Iranian opposition, rather than the empty threats and rhetoric of their illegitimate leader.

The sanctions of the past 30 years and Iran's present resolve on the nuclear issue are proof that the Iranian government does not respond well to the winds of international pressure, especially when they're blowing in from the west.

But the regime cannot last long without the support of its own people, and by continuing to restrict the basic civil liberties of Iranian citizens, the allegedly Islamic Republic is digging its own grave.

When Ahmadinejad takes the stage on Wednesday in New York, I expect to hear a lot of the same rhetoric that has made him infamous around the world. But by focusing on his moronic holocaust denials and tirades against the West instead of his brutality toward his own people, world leaders will only be playing into the hands of a desperate dictator.