No One Knows Everything

But you'd think that when specifically mocking presidential candidates for ignorance of the Middle East people ought to research basic facts. The Telegraph's Tim Stanley disagrees:

According to Perry, the US can’t deal with Iran in isolation. You see, “There is an area over there of all of them working together” [one might call it, "the Middle East"], and if we’re going to tackle Iran as a nuclear threat then “we need to bring Syria into the mix.” His logic seemed to be that the only way to safeguard the world against the Shiite theocracy of Iran was to launch a war against the Sunni-dominated secular dictatorship of Syria.

No, the Syrian regime is dominated by the Alawi sect. They are recognised as Shias by the Iranian mullahs although some would regard them as heretics. They certainly are not Sunnis though.

This matters because given the religious fanaticism of the Middle East and the Alawi's status as near-heretics to many fundamentalists, the recognition as being legitimate Muslims by the Iranian regime is extremely valuable to the Assad junta.

Stuxnet In The Middle With You

Like Infidel I am very impressed by what the Stuxnet computer virus thingy has done to the Iranian nuclear programme. Making war by outwitting the enemy rather than killing them is an all round improvement.

Up until now cyber warfare has largely meant either Chinese epionage or Russia's petulant denial of service attacks against their enemies. This is much more sophisticated and suggests that the West is just as keen on using computers as weapons.

The only regrettable part is that it is now known about so therefore less effective.

The Many Tentacles Of The Calamari Owned Government

I see that President Ahmadinijad of Iran has denounced "Paul the Psychic Octopus", who famously predicted 8 games out of 8 at the World Cup. What does this tell us about the Iranian president? Mostly that he is taking his favourite propaganda a bit too literally:






He doesn't really get the idea of metaphors.

Quote Of The Day.

Peter Risdon on Darius Guppy- fraudster, moron, thug, friend of Boris and latterly a supporter of the Iranian ayatollahs:

But it would be a mistake to get too drawn into his argument. Guppy's theme is not, in fact, Iran. It's Darius Guppy. Ever since being released from jail, he has been convinced that Britain's failure to hail him as a warrior prince is a sign of its decadence. This was in him before, in the form of a fascination with strong-man leaders of the past, like Napoleon and Hitler, but has become more entrenched since.

Pressing The Reset Button.

It's too early to say that President Obama's foreign policy in in crisis. However the policy of building bridges, engaging and entering dialogue without any conditions, with countries that had fallen out with the USA needs rethinking.

It is one thing to repair some of the silly and pointless rifts that emerged between the USA and some European countries during the Bush administration. However applying this idea towards the likes of Russia and Iran isn't going to work. To present the Russian government with a symbolic reset button implies that the tense atmosphere between Russia and the USA was the result of US actions and had nothing to do with Russia's actions over the last few years.

Similarly his unconditional offer to engage with Iran not only undercut the EU 3 who had been trying to end Iran's nuclear programme with assorted diplomatic sticks and carrots it has also seems to have led the US government to react slowly to the ayatollahs election stealing antics for fear of imposing such preconditions.

The policy seems to have come about as a result of a gaffe in a debate with Hillary Clinton, but because a lot of his party's primary voters could only see foreign policy in terms of domestic politics- by which I mean they assumed that because they didn't like Bush, that any fraught relationships the USA had under his administration must have been the result of his failings- the gaffe became a very popular idea.

How Insane Is The Iranian Government?

Well they believe that the British government is competent to organise something:

Addressing crowds at Friday prayers at Tehran University, Khamenei said that an 11 million-vote margin proved no fraud had taken place.

He blamed Great Britain and Iran's external enemies for the unrest, calling the British government the 'most treacherous'.

Quite utterly bonkers. If Gordon Brown could organise millions of people to turn out on to the streets then Labour would have done rather better in the most recent set of elections.

Unfortunately I now think the Iranian protesters are going to be crushed quite brutally.

Outcasts Of The World Unite.

Does anyone else find it vaguely amusing when assorted international pariah's get together to offer each other support and understanding:

The leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on Tuesday congratulated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his election win, Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said.

The SCO groups Russia, China and the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Iran has observer status at SCO.

International politics is like a school playground, if no one lets you hang out with them then you can form your own gang of outcasts and pretend to like each other. They can't really form a coherent bloc based purely on not being liked very much though.

Iran

Iran's election looks like it was rigged. Which begs the obvious question as to why.

Obviously Iran is a corrupt undemocratic theocracy but the usual means of rigging elections is to prevent all but a select group of pre approved candidates from standing in the first place and then let the election proceed normally.

It might make sense as a gesture of hostility against the outside world but the amount of internal dissent it has created seems like a high cost to pay for a gesture.

Update: My theory, which I haven't put to any thorough examination, is that the Ayatollah's decided to fix the election only after the results of the Lebanon election where Hezbollah's alliance did worse than anticipated. After all if that was followed by a 'reformer' winning in Iran it would create momentum for reformers.

My Enemy's Enemy

Al Qaeda have been denouncing Iran as yankee imperialist puppets, or some such nonsense. Whilst both Iran and Al Qaeda can broadly be described as Islamists, or Islamic Fundamentalists it would be a mistake to conflate the two or assume that they have common interests. Fanatics hate infidels alright but they really hate heretics, and to Sunni Islamists like Al Qaeda, the Shia Islamists in Tehran are the enemy.

Iran nearly got into a full scale war with Al Qaeda's soulmates, the Taliban, back in the late 1990s after the latter organisation murdered some Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan.

This doesn't mean that there will never be cooperation between the two sets of fanatics, Iran does support the Sunni group Hamas and has been alleged to now be supporting their old adversaries the Taliban in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda on the other hand are too stupid to understand the concept of my enemy's enemy is my friend and prefer to keep blowing up Shia in Iraq rather than allying with them against us. However there is a fundamental tension between the two groups that it may be possible to exploit in the same way that differences between the two communist powers, China and the USSR, were exploited by Nixon back in the 1970s.

{Via}

£830000- The Price Of British Foreign Policy?

The Mail on Sunday has unearthed another Labour donor scandal which appears to once again breach the laws that they themselves passed. An Iranian born French citizen who only acquired British citizenship the day before he donated has apparently given the Labour party £830 000 this year. Two things occur to me, firstly the decision to back the discredited head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair looks like being the only smart decision they've made of late, having someone who so obviously owes them a favour in charge of the force investigating them looks very wise.

Secondly was accepting money from an Iranian born businessman less than a month after the release of the sailors that Iran abducted a wise move. The government's response to the hostage taking was notably feeble and the fact that it occurred at a time when Labour were apparently in discussions with an Iranian born donor looks very suspect.

Rushdie & The Ruskie.

Two more points about the Rushdie gong:

He is no martyr for liberal freedoms.

In the rant of his I linked to in my previous post, the one where he argues that Britain has imported a new empire to dominate with poor non white victims like him, which incidentally means he saying that we are all evil imperialist bastards even when we stay at home and mind our own business, he says:

And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multicultrualism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradication the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.

The threat of implied violence in that paragraph strongly implies a threat of violence if you will forgive the tautology, albeit only in the form of radical chic posing, if evil white people don't do what he says.

I'm really going to have to perform a more thorough fisking of Rushdie's drivel at some point.

The second point about the knighthood is that it has overshadowed a far more deserving recipient, Oleg Gordievsky, who two decades ago put himself in far greater peril than Rushdie was ever in to defect to Britain. As a KGB agent he had been working for Britain for years before he was rumbled.

Iconography Unprotected.

Last year the unfunny comedian Stewart Lee explained why it was alright for him to satirise christianity but unacceptable for Danish cartoonists to satirise Islam.

I don’t think that the cartoonists have appreciated the massive taboo that you cross by having an image of Mohammed. There’s no historical precedent for that. So I think really in the West Christianity relinquished the right to be protected of its icons the day that they put Virgin Mary snow globes on sale in the Vatican, but in Islamic culture it’s a very different thing... The iconography of Christianity is up for grabs the iconography of - to use a corporate image - Islam’s always been a lot more conscientious about protecting its brand and so I think you need to engage with it as a satirist on its own terms.”

Like a lot of people I believed that the enthusiam for offending christians but not muslims was down to two reasons, firstly there are a small but dangerous minority of muslims who are willing to kill to silence criticism of their religion and secondly because satirising Islam doesn't earn anyone brownie points from polite society. However it turns out that even Lee's point about Islam being more protective of their 'brand' that christianity is nonsense in any case, this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about the 'Shrine of Imam Reza' in Iran which apparantly attracts more muslims pilgrims than Mecca explains that:

The shrine has for centuries intermingled faith and money, collecting donations of cash, land, jewelry and works of art from the devout. Today, it is not only Iran's most sacred religious site but also, by some reckonings, the Islamic republic's biggest and richest business empire.

Companies in its corporate portfolio make everything from city buses to pizza strudels to growth hormones for caviar-producing sturgeon.

So Stewart Lee now has the opportunity to prove all of us who thought that he was simply a coward wrong, because by his reasoning Islam has 'relinquished its right to be protected'.

We Paean North Korea.

One last (I hope) post about the recently released hostages. They have been criticised in some quarters for the 'confessions' they made, personally I don't see the problem because everyone knows that obviously coerced statements are fake, but wouldn't it have been nice if they could have done something similar to what Lloyd Bulcher, commander of the USS Pueblo, did when he and his crew were captured by the North Koreans in 1968:

Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, Commanding Officer of the Pueblo was tortured and put through a mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess. Eventually the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented. None of the Koreans knew English well enough to write the confession, so they had Bucher write it himself. They verified the meaning of his words, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung."

Hello Sailors.

The abducted sailors appear to be about to be released now which is in and of itself a good thing. However if Iran received any concessions in return for this deal, such as the release of their diplomat yesterday, then we have created an incentive for them to capture further hostages in future. No one has ever doubted that simply doing what Iran told us to would result in the release of the Navy personel, so it is particularly witless to babble on, as Matthew Yglesias does here, about 'Doves 1, Hawks 0', when we don't what combination of sticks and carrots have been shown to Iran behind the scenes.

The Limits Of Neutrality.

The petition in todays Guardian by over 300 journalists, editors and broadcasters calling for the immediate release of the abducted BBC journalist Alan Johnston is admirable in purpose and one can only hope that it will have an impact. The resolute tone adopted by media outlets when reporting the abduction of a journalist throws into sharp contrast the reportage of Iran's abduction of 15 sailors and marines. Wheras almost all the reports of Mr Johnston's abduction use words like 'abducted' 'hostage' and 'kidnapped' reports about the British Servicemen & service woman routinely use less precise words such as 'captives', 'prisoners' and 'taken' which muddy the truth of what has actualy happened.

In fact going further in an era where Fox News is treated with disdain by the rest of the media world for being so crass as to make it clear that they are not neutral between the West and it's enemies, by for example letting newsreaders wear lapel badges of their nation's flag, one has to wonder why it seems to be acceptable to take an ethical stand over the disappearance of a journalist but not over war with a barbarian regime like the Taliban. Of course objective reporting should not be neutral between right and wrong any more than objective geography should be neutral between the Flat Earth theory and the Spherical globe concept.

So why is it considered okay for the BBC to organise a petion demand the release of Alan Johnston but not demand the release of the sailors?

A Feminist Goes To Iran.

In the midst of the ongoing crisis about Iran I thought it would be fun to remind everyone what former Liberal Democrat MP and current head of the RSPCA had to say about her time in the country. The article titled 'Another Kind Of Freedom' appeared in the Guardian five years ago and I like it so much that I've referred back to it frequently. Put it this way she makes Walter Duranty look like a perceptive observer of tyranny. I won't add any further comments myself, the only purpose is to point and mock. Although I'm sure she's going to appear on the media soon spouting off about the hostage crisis, so feel free to refer back to this post. All bolding is by me.

But how many "liberals" who blame the religion for denial of women's rights, especially the compulsory wearing of hijab (a headscarf and roopush or coat), blame protestantism in Britain or catholicism in Mexico for endemic domestic violence? ....

....The other day I had lunch with three Iranian women.... They talked about their lives and what they thought about the west - only the older woman had been out of Iran. She felt sorry for western women who not only have to bring up children and run a home, but also have to go out to paid employment. She thought in that respect Iranian women were more free......

...Women in Iran have other freedoms denied to many in the west. I have a British friend, for example, married to an Iranian, who has a one-year-old child. Rather than finding the baby (who is still being breastfed) a barrier to resuming her academic career she has been given help and encouragement, including a work-based creche, by potential employers. She also will happily feed her baby in public - in restaurants (not in the toilets) and in shared taxis, and no one complains or comments....

....I find it refreshing not to see naked or half-naked women on posters advertising everything from cars to ice-cream. On the other hand, I am reliably informed that Iranian men see it as their duty to make sure their wives are satisfied in bed - not a responsibility I think many British men are familiar with. Women also keep their own names after marriage, whereas in the west the woman who does this is still seen as an oddity.

It is many years since British women have felt free to walk the city streets after dark without fear of attack. I feel very safe here.....

.... If women dress in a sexually provocative or attractive way, perhaps it is not surprising that men respond to them as sexual beings rather than as professional women or mothers or shop assistants. I am not saying that a woman who wears a short skirt is "asking for it" but I do think western women ought to examine their complicity in a society in which men are given "come-on" signals and "don't dare" messages in confusing profusion.

Pathetic.

What is worse, that a gangster regime like Iran can abduct British sailers and marines without shots being fired or the Jimmy Carter like response of Tony Blair, a man who has never seen an enemy of the state he hasn't wanted to roll over for (see his attitude to the IRA & the Argentinian Junta for examples). Iran is not a powerful country and its economy is dependant on the export of oil. It would not be hard to prevent oil tankers from entering Iranian water and sabotage their oil pipelines but instead the government prefers to discuss Iran's piracy as though they were chatting about trade policy with Belgium. Now he is going to get 'tough', and has issued Iran with a blood curdling threat that.... the situation "move into a different phase". A warning whose gravitas might have been enhanced had it not been made on GMTV. Unsurprisngly this does not appear to have concentrated Iranian minds even though it does represent a scaling up of Blair's previous stance which was to talk descreetly to Tehran.

An Act Of War.

I've been pretty sceptical about the necessity of going to war with Iran becasue I don't believe that they are a major threat. However the abduction of 15 British sailors from international waters is quite clearly an act of war and merits a milatary response. This is second time that they have pulled a stunt like this and they have to be taught a lesson.

Parsis Piqued.

Whilst Iran has been making itself a laughing stock with its complaints about the film '300', with Borat-esque boasts about the 'glorious Persian civilization', another group with more reason to be upset by the film has been largely overlooked. India's Parsis have been objecting too. Unlike Iran the Zoroastrian Parsi's culture derives directly from that of ancient Persia as their ancestors fled from that land centuries ago to escape religious persecution, for all Iran's complaining about the depiction of Persians as sub human their own attitude to their pagan past is hardly respectful and if Xerces found himself in modern Iran he would be a second class citizen. The Parsi community is tiny but high achieving, Britain's first two asian MPs back in the 1890s were both Parsi for example.