Email to a Chinese friend, on the movie "The Stoning of Soraya M"

Overly didactic?

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Iran's democracy was overthrown in 1953 by the US CIA with some aid from the British. It was done partly for the benefit of BP. We installed the Shah, who ruled with a brutal secret police force until he was overthrown in 1979. The forces that eventually took power were religious fundamentalists, holding to a very archaic and inflexible version of Islam.

(The religion is Islam; a person who believes in Islam is a Muslim.)

Islam does hold that a woman should have her head "covered" in some way, but the method is widely open to interpretation. Some interpret it as a scarf. Some interpret it as meaning that the woman should be completely covered so she can't be seen at all. The latter view isn't
well supported by the actual scripture, but different societies have come to believe in it, and it has become ingrained in some of them over time. I think it is deeply unfair.

All religion means superstition, but there are different views within all religions as well. The official Iranian Islam is extreme. Nothing inherent in Islam, however, makes it worse than Judaism or Christianity.

Stoning as a method of killing is found in the Christian bible as well; you may remember it from The Brick Testament as a punishment for adultresses (like they claimed Soraya M. was) and children who disrespect their parents. The difference is that there isn't a Christian society that actually listens to that part of the Bible anymore, so far as I know; it's ignored. I think that gradually happens with all religions, that the more terrible parts are slowly
stripped away.

Women are still something in Iran, but barbaric ancient punishments for adultery still exist, and they don't have equal rights. You might be surprised, on the other hand, to learn that a significant majority of university students in Iran are women. I don't know why that is.

I despise the Iranian penal system, and think Iran needs a new government. On the other hand, I also admire Iran's resistance to US hegemony, and support it in that. I think you're right to admire their resistance. I would like to see the current regime in Iran end, but I DON'T want Washington to do it (you had better believe there are parts of the US government working on it), and I don't want to see a new regime subservient to the US emerge in its stead. I don't like the
Iranian government, but I support the integrity of Iran against US intervention.

You have to remember that the US opposition to Iran has little to do with its legal system and everything to do with its understandable failure to serve or bow down to Washington. Saudi Arabia has a similarly brutal regime of religious law, but it is a US ally, so Washington is very quiet about its atrocities. In fact, we are about to ship $60 billion worth of weapons there.

Islam has nonetheless come in for especial demonization in the US, for essentially the same reason that Judaism used to before the Holocaust: racism and xenophobia. Muslims are a disadvantaged minority in the US, discriminated against by fearful bigots. My criticism of Islam as a religion is tempered by the use that militarists, warmongers, and racists make of it to justify discrimination and war.

In short:

• The US only cares about human rights violations of its enemies.
  
• Religions are stupid, but there are differing views within all religions.
  
• Most Muslims don't hold the views of the Iranian government.
  
• I support the Iranian people both against their own government and against the US.
  
• The worst possible situation for them is the US declaring war and destroying yet another country.
  

These are just my views, but I hope they make some sense.

Oh my God, we're going to die!

The headline in this article from the Times of London is "Tehran has enough material for two nuclear bombs, IAEA says."

Terrifying! A few days is all that stands between America and nuclear destruction! ...assuming of course, that the Iranians are crazy, and nuclear weapons are permissible, but only when held by the US and its friends.

In the NYT about a week ago, for example, you find the US possesses 5,113 nuclear weapons. The military strategists who write the article say, in a fit of astounding noncomformity, that "That is exactly 4,802 more than we need." This, they say, is enough to annihilate a population and its industrial capacity, or "should we want to hit an enemy without destroying its society, the 311 weapons would be adequate for taking out a wide range of 'hardened targets' like missile silos or command-and-control bunkers." Just a thought, you know, that you might not want to destroy a society. They advocate distributing a hundred in ICBMs scattered throughout the US, giving nineteen to B-2 stealth bombers, which, along with nuclear submarines carrying around 192 missiles at any given time, should allow us to project the threat of atomic annihilation anywhere around the globe.

That what these thinkers advocate, far beyond anything Obama has proposed or is likely to accept, is something like the dovish option in today's military climate, is unneeded further evidence of our collective insanity. But how many nuclear warheads are too many for Iran to have? One. And apparently they have two, or will in the very near future.

Or not. When you read the article, you find "Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium stands at two tonnes, enough to arm two nuclear warheads if enriched further." (emphasis added) Do these three words change the meaning of the headline? Let's consider analogies.

"I could have drowned if there were water in the pool."
"Put your hands where I can see them! We are prepared to use deadly force, or would be if our firearms were loaded!"
"Iraq's WMD could have deterred a US invasion if they existed."

Iran doesn't have fissile material enriched to the level necessary for weaponization and won't for years. So what this article is breathlessly warning us is that the situation is actually unchanged

Sure you've seen this, but just in case...
"Russia and China, which have close ties to Iran, joined fellow permanent council members Britain, France and the United States as well as non-member Germany in supporting the sanctions proposal, ignoring a deal that Tehran agreed to a day earlier to try to stave off the penalties." For a moment I was worried that the eminently sensible enrichment deal would somehow preclude the drive to war.

Peter Hart of FAIR, with aid from Chomsky (who seems to pop up here every day), here points out what I did yesterday, but better, highlighting the difference between US media's version of the "international consensus" and the actual positions of most people and countries. Chompers:

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran's right to enrich Uranium, in accord with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively accept U.S. orders.

We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S./Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel and U.S. forces deployed there. (3) The U.S. should accept the NPT. (4) The U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.

The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed "the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions" facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies, this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

This text is in fact from 2008, but could be written now with no amendment. Strong echoes of Iraq... "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

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So what's the plan for Iran? Apparently there are about 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan but there will be soon be something like 250,000 DoD outside contractors there, in line with the ideology of privatization in general and further removing "our troops" and mercenaries from oversight. A sane observer might note that the US can't pay for a war, but where there's a will, there's a way. We've overthrown Iran's government before. Our politicians watched the Green Revolution and salivated last year, and our publicly touted new military strategy relies on training the natives of the countries we need to control to quell unrest, a sort of delegation of war. Are these things connected?

I should also link Richard Estes on the planned reconfiguration of NATO. That sort of entry (and some of the comments to it) are the exact sort of thing I wish I could do here.

Have Turkey and Brazil temporarily prevented a US war on Iran? The deal involves shipping low-enriched uranium to Turkey to be exchanged for 20%-enriched uranium from Europe.

The WaPo hews disgustingly to the US line; in an article titled "Iran creates illusion of progress in nuclear negotiations," the journo admits "The best hope for U.S. officials is Iranian intransigence... Iran now must present a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna explaining the details of the transaction, which U.S. officials privately hope will begin the process of unraveling it." Well isn't that we all hope for? Heaven forbid the US failed to escalate sanctions or start a war.

Would Obama accept such a thing? "Obama administration officials reacted coolly[.]"

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Chomsky denied entry to Israel/OPT. He was to speak at Bir Zeit University.