– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. —

Words of wisdom from an American leader: “The United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.

“If we are an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way but if we are a humble nation, they’ll respect us.”

President Barack Obama, the newly-minted winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, speaking about U.S. engagement with the rest of the world, including anti-American leaders? No, the exhortation for superpower humbleness came from George W. Bush when he was running for president in 2000.

Whether this was campaign rhetoric or conviction will never be known but if it was the latter, it ended eight months into Bush’s first term.

The word “humble” disappeared from Washington’s political lexicon after the Sept. 11, 2001 mass murders in New York and Washington and during the rest of Bush’s eight-year presidency, the United States came to be seen, in large parts of the world, as the epitome of superpower arrogance.

“Humble” is back in fashion. Nine months into his first term, Obama told the United Nations General Assembly he was “humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me” and determined to meet the challenge of collective action. Three weeks later, he stood in the White House Rose Garden to say he was “deeply humbled” by the Nobel Committee’s decision to give him the Peace Prize.

But like his predecessor, who was resented in much of the world, Obama is running into foreign policy problems as resistant to humility and the collective action the president often conjures as they were resistant to Bush’s unilateral approach. Does Obama’s rock star-like celebrity help?

So far, not really. In Germany, for example, 93 percent of those polled in a survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project said they had confidence the U.S. president would do the right thing in world affairs. Would that translate into more German troops for the war in Afghanistan which is unpopular in Germany? Not likely.

In his speech to the United Nations, Obama pointed out that American unilateral actions had fed “an almost reflexive anti-Americanism, which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction.” While anti-Americanism may be on the wane in many parts of the world, there is no sign of a corresponding increase of support for U.S. foreign policy on key issues.

Nor is there evidence of a wholesale decline in the tendency of a good number of U.S. political figures to assume that people from other countries think like Americans. That has been a perennial problem in America’s dealings with the world. It was the reason, for example, why the Bush administration was so surprised by the resounding 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, the Islamist group shunned as terrorists by most of the West, in Gaza.

CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?

More recently, that’s why some in Washington were taken aback by the angry reaction in Pakistan to a bill passed in Congress this month that tripled U.S. assistance over the next five years. It was meant as part of an effort to build a new relationship with Pakistan, whose cooperation Washington needs to fight Taliban and al Qaeda elements along the border with Afghanistan.

The bill contained language on conditions tied to the tripled aid that were seen by many Pakistanis as a humiliating violation of national sovereignty and an affront to dignity, an issue particularly sensitive in Pakistan, which is one of the few countries apparently immune to Obama’s charm. (The Pew survey’s favorability rating for the United States showed a drop from 19 percent in 2008 to a dismal 16 percent in 2009).

What seemed perfectly legitimate to lawmakers in Washington — no disbursement of aid unless Pakistan demonstrated a “sustained commitment” to crack down on terrorism — was seen as an insult by the Pakistanis. Which raises the question whether a humble superpower is a contradiction in terms.

Or whether humility will impress the leaders Obama has to deal with if he wants to succeed where Bush and other presidents failed - get North Korea and Iran to drop their nuclear ambitions, persuade Israel and the Palestinians to end their conflict, defang international terrorists and last but not least, achieve his dream of a nuclear-free world.

On that, he sounded a somber note when he commented on his Nobel Peace Prize: maybe not “in my lifetime.” Sobering detail: Obama is 48.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com)

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

Seven summers ago, in a crowded conference room of a Washington hotel, an Iranian exile leader gave the first detailed public account of Iran’s until-then secret nuclear projects at the cities of Natanz and Arak. It greatly turned up the volume of a seemingly endless international controversy over Iran’s nuclear intentions.

The disclosures, on August 14, 2002, did little to earn the group that made them, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), merit points from the U.S. government. A year later, the Washington office of the NCRI, the political offshoot of Iran’s Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) resistance movement, was shut. The State Department placed the group on its list of terrorist organizations. (The MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran, had been given that designation in 1997).

Now, another five summers later, two dozen MEK supporters are on hunger strike across from the White House to exhort the U.S. government to stick to promises to protect some 3,500 members of the organization in a camp north of Baghdad. Iraqi forces stormed Camp Ashraf in late July and the MEK says nine residents were killed in the initial assault. Two have since died of their injuries.

Hunger strikes in solidarity with the residents of Camp Ashraf were also taking place in Berlin, London, Brussels and Ottawa and at the camp itself. They draw attention to an arrangement that was both unique and bizarre - an enclave of people labeled terrorists by Washington but protected by U.S. military forces - and speak volumes about erratic U.S. policies on a group hated by Iran’s theocracy.

Those at Camp Ashraf, including around 1,000 women, have become, in effect, bargaining chips in the complicated relationship between the United States, Iraq and Iran. The raid on the camp coincided with a visit to Iraq by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. What better way for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to demonstrate  that the Iraqis, not the Americans, are in charge now that Iraqi troops have assumed control under the Status of Forces Agreement signed last year?

What better way, too for Maliki, once derided as an American puppet, to show Iran’s hard-liners and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated government wants to tighten relations with Tehran? The raid on Camp Ashraf drew applause from Iranian officials, including Ali Larijani, the hard-line speaker of parliament. “Praiseworthy,” he said, “even though it is rather late.”

The MEK was founded in 1965 by leftist students and intellectuals opposed to the Shah of Iran, and it played a part in the Islamic revolution that toppled his rule in 1979. But it soon fell out with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and was banned in 1981, when it began a campaign of bombings and assassinations of government officials.

WARNINGS OF HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

In 1986, under an agreement with Saddam Hussein, it established bases in Iraq from where it launched cross-border raids into Iran.

Since 2003, when U.S. forces disarmed MEK guerrillas in Camp Ashraf and took over its protection, the government in Iran has repeatedly demanded that they be turned over to Iran. Their prospects there would be bleak, more so at a time when the Iranian government is staging mass trials of people who demonstrated against Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June.

In an open letter to President Barack Obama, in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times, MEK supporters this week warned of a humanitarian disaster unless U.S. forces reassumed control, at least temporarily. “The long-term solution to the problem is the presence in Ashraf of United Nations forces or at least a U.N. monitoring mission.”

This is not the first time that the MEK has served as a bargaining chip in Middle Eastern politics. The group was placed on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations in 1997 at a time when the Clinton administration hoped the move would facilitate opening a dialogue with Iran and its newly elected president, Mohammad Khatami, who was seen as a moderate.

The European Union put the MEK on its terrorist blacklist five years later. Critics of the decision saw it as kowtowing to Iranian demands to avoid harming important trade relations. After years of legal wrangling, the EU took the MEK off its list of banned terrorist organizations on Jan. 26, a decision that infuriated Tehran.

Somewhat ironically for a country described as the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism” by the U.S. State Department, Iran said the EU’s decision meant Europe had “distanced itself from the path of the international community in fighting terror.”

The Obama administration has shown no sign of even considering taking the MEK off the terrorist list and thus further complicate its already complicated relations with Iran. Is abandoning the people at Camp Ashraf to an uncertain fate an option?

Thomas Mucha is the managing editor in charge of correspondents for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. The views expressed are his own. –

It’s been a fascinating few weeks for global news — the real kind, of course — but also for the fake stuff.

I’m referring to “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” which sent correspondents and producers to locales where comedy shows don’t normally operate: Iran and Iraq. Along the way, these two Comedy Central commercial properties cooked up plenty of laughs. But they also produced some insightful — and certainly entertaining — coverage of these two complex and important global stories.

If Wolf Blitzer isn’t quaking in his beard, he should be.

These foreign forays produced powerful storytelling that illustrates how intelligence and humor, when mixed with a little ground truth, can add depth to very serious matters. It also demonstrates how fake news is, indisputably, a power on the global media stage. As an added bonus it was yet another funny and scathing attack on the pompous earnestness that typifies much of the mainstream media: You know you’re in trouble if you can be so brutally, and effortlessly, parodied.

Let’s start with Iran, where The Daily Show began with a simple idea, but then got much more than it was expecting.

To cover the country’s presidential election, Daily Show host and executive producer Jon Stewart sent “senior foreign correspondent” Jason Jones and producer Tim Greenberg to Tehran for two weeks (the trip followed Jones’ last Daily Show piece, “End Times,” which savaged the New York Times and went viral on the web).

Armed with official journalist visas granted by the Iranian government, Jones and Greenberg traveled to Tehran to tell jokes, but also to poke fun at American conceptions of Iran as “evil.”

In full parody mode, they titled their series “Behind the Veil: Minarets of Menace,” and produced an animated introduction filled with ominous Middle Eastern music, and featuring a preening and heroic Jones scampering through the desert. It’s the kind of cable TV flash-and-dash that Anderson Cooper would kill for.

Media-mocking humor is rampant throughout the reports: there’s Jones dressed as the stereotypical foreign correspondent — requisite facial stubble, khaki reporter’s vest and dark sunglasses, a Persian scarf draped roguishly around his neck.

There are bumbling interactions with the usual media suspects in Iran, including former foreign minister Ebrahim Yazdi, reformist cleric Mohammad Ali Abtahi, and Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari, to whom Jones speaks Arabic instead of Farsi.

There are also street interviews with “seething” Iranians where Jones tries, and fails, to make them say how much they hate America. On the contrary: upon learning of Jones’ Daily Show connections, one smiling and stylish young man launches into a killer impersonation of Stewart’s staccato George W. Bush. “Heh, heh, heh …. heh heh heh.”

The coup de grace comes when Jones visits a Tehran home complete with a happy and clearly prosperous couple, two bubbly kids, flat-screen TVs and a Wii gaming console. “You have a beautiful cave,” Jones says, handing the young daughter a carton of Marlboro Reds to “earn their trust.”

Yes, the joke here is on the American audience.

Iranians are normal. They wear Dolce & Gabbana and Diesel, play video games and produce rap music. They know more about American geography and history than many Americans (one elderly man ticks off U.S. presidents in reverse order — “Bush, Clinton, Bush the father, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon” — juxtaposed, naturally, with an American in Times Square who can’t answer the question, “Name a country in the Middle East that begins with I-R-A-N.”) The satire is funny. It is also devastatingly effective.

But as the events in Tehran darkened (Jones and Greenberg left Iran before the serious violence began), the tone of the coverage changed.

A later piece points out that Yazdi, Abtahi and Bahari (”the Axis of Evil’s Axis of Evil”) had been detained by authorities. The reports filled with the grainy and visceral YouTube videos culled from Andrew Sullivan or Nico Pitney’s running coverage of the uprising. And the final report leaves the humor behind altogether:

“As I watch what’s happening there now, ” Jones says, “I know that somewhere in that sea of faces are the same people I had met, people who were gracious enough to take me into their homes, and schools, and coffee shops, people who indulged my asinine questions, people I hope will be safe and not be harmed or arrested for the simple act of wearing green and wanting a voice.”

Do the millions of Americans who watched this series (or, more likely, internet video clips of it) have a better understanding of what’s happening inside Iran? Do they now have a stronger sense of daily life there? Do they now know more about the things that unite, rather than divide, the people of these two countries? And did they have fun watching it?

Mission accomplished.

The Colbert Report, which earlier this month broadcast a week of shows from Saddam Hussein’s former Al Faw Palace in Baghdad, was equally impressive in its foreign coverage — not least for pulling off the technical feat of producing five 30 minute programs from a war zone 5,200 miles from its studios in Manhattan.

So why transplant an entire comedy show into difficult, even dangerous, conditions? To correct yet another shortcoming of the mainstream media, of course: Iraq had fallen off the news map. Here’s how Colbert explained it in the June 6 edition of Newsweek, for which he was the magazine’s guest editor:

“I hadn’t seen it in the media for a while, and when I don’t see something, I assume it’s vanished forever, like in that terrifying game peekaboo. We stopped seeing much coverage of the Iraq War back in September when the economy tanked, and I just figured the insurgents were wiped out because they were heavily invested in Lehman Brothers.”

Funny, of course. But Colbert’s Baghdad caper was also smart, courageous, and culturally relevant (the media-savvy President Obama doesn’t play along with a dangerous comedian like Colbert unless there’s a political upside).

Clips of the Baghdad shows quickly flooded YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter, as well as the mainstream media (The New York Times, Baltimore Sun, Time, Newsweek and others covered it). And so, like Jones in Iran, Colbert’s mission was also accomplished.

No, this is not journalism. And neither Colbert nor his Daily Show counterparts make that claim.

But in an increasingly global media landscape where satire bleeds into analysis and where hope meets the brutality of a Basij baton, fake news is playing an increasingly important role — particularly on the internet, where hundreds of thousands of people download, watch and share these clips each day.

Love it or hate it, millions of people are paying attention to fake news across America and the world.

(Click here for the article on GlobalPost.)

(For previous columns by Thomas Mucha on GlobalPost, click here.)

(Above: U.S. General Ray Odierno, Commanding General, Multinational-Force-Iraq, prepares to give actor/comedian Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” a haircut during Colbert’s performance for U.S. military personnel at Al Faw Palace in Baghdad in this USO handout photo dated June 7, 2009.  REUTERS/Steve Manuel/USO/Handout)

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –

“There is a great deal about Iran that we do not know…The United States lacks critical information needed for analysts to make many of their judgments with confidence about Iran.”

That was the verdict of a Congressional committee on U.S. intelligence policy two years ago. How valid it still is was highlighted by Iran’s June elections and their turbulent aftermath.

By most accounts, the huge margin of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s victory, the equally huge demonstrations of Iranians crying fraud, and their brutal repression all came as surprises to U.S. intelligence and foreign policy experts.

The reasons for America’s problems of coming to grips with Iran are manifold: a 30-year absence of diplomats on the ground, an opaque political system difficult to penetrate, wishful thinking, a perennial temptation to “mirror-image,” that is to expect others to think and behave like yourself. Last but not
least: an acute shortage of Farsi-speaking analysts and agents.

The number of people in the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, 16 separate agencies with more than 100,000 employees, who speak Iran’s language is classified, as is the number of fluent Arabic and Pashto speakers. (The State Department says it has 22 foreign service officers out of 6,500 who are fluent in Farsi.)

The problem is not new and it contributed to the notorious misjudgments of the situation in Iran by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1978, a few months before the Islamic revolution that sent the Shah fleeing into exile.

Said the CIA: “Iran is not a revolutionary state or even pre-revolutionary state.” Echoed the DIA: The Shah “is expected to remain actively involved in power over the next 10 years.”

There have been no CIA or DIA predictions of how long Ahmedinejad will stay in power but there have been public pledges to address the language deficit.

Its overall scale was thrown into sharp focus by the government’s disclosure, long after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, that it had a 123,000-hour backlog of taped message traffic in Middle Eastern languages.

America’s intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, says that a “lack of language-qualified personnel has been a perennial problem for the Intelligence Community.”

Leon Panetta, President Barack Obama’s choice as CIA chief, has repeatedly spoken of the need for officers who “read, speak and understand foreign languages.”

President George W. Bush two years ago announced a National Security Language Initiative to “dramatically increase” the number of Americans learning, speaking, and teaching “critical need” foreign languages. That was followed by a five-year Strategic Human Capital Plan that pinpointed part of what is one of the biggest problems: “non-U.S. citizens who cannot meet our security requirements.”

DIFFICULT SECURITY CLEARANCE

That phrase leaves out the huge pool of American citizens who are native speakers of Farsi, Arabic and other languages deemed critical for gaining a better understanding of  opaque countries like Iran or penetrating al Qaeda and its affiliates.

The vetting process for a security clearance is almost as high a barrier for them as for non-citizens. For decades, dual citizenship and having close non-citizen family members were grounds for automatic disqualification from jobs that required a security clearance.

That changed last October with a new directive that allows exceptions to be granted on a case-by-case basis when there is a “compelling need that is based upon specific national security
considerations.”

That requirement  is hard to meet for first-generation Americans who have close relatives living in Middle Eastern countries. The government fears they could be subject to blackmail or family pressure.

Added to this, there is “an underlying mistrust of Muslim Americans or Arab Americans in the national security area,” according to Frederick P. Hitz, a former inspector general of the CIA. In a recent book (Why Spy? Espionage in an Age of Uncertainty), Hitz termed this mistrust “short-sighted and a return to the attitude that enabled the United States to intern Japanese Americans during World War II.”

While the intelligence agencies, in the words of  Dennis Blair,  “continue to wrestle with clearing people who are native speakers of critical languages,”  the vetting process can take a year or more, somewhat of a disincentive even for potential recruits brimming with patriotic spirit.

The language deficit is so serious that some in the intelligence community think addressing it requires an effort as sweeping as the programs that were put into place after the Russians launched the first earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 and the U.S. realized how far behind it was in space technology.

Sputnik spurred a major push to get young Americans to study mathematics, physics and Russian.

This is not likely to happen.

Given the time it takes to learn difficult languages, senior intelligence officials say the immediate emphasis is on drawing recruits from first-generation citizens.

It’s a work in progress and progress is slow. Which begs the question whether America’s intelligence services are as omniscient and omnipotent as Washington’s adversaries make them out to be.

Iran’s government saw the hand of the CIA behind the street protests and violence that followed Ahmedinejad’s June 12 elections. Perhaps it was. But a deep study of the Iran by one of America’s most respected think tanks makes one wonder.

Commissioned by the U.S. Air Force and released by the RAND Corporation a few weeks before the elections, the 230-page study said America’s understanding of Iran’s complex political landscape was so limited that attempts to foment internal unrest were likely to be unsuccessful.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own —

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of much western comment on the unfolding crisis in Iran has been its over-simplification and lack of historical awareness. Perspectives are shaped by a single issue (western concerns about whether Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program) and the desire to draw a simple Manichean distinction between good guys (liberal-democrats) and bad ones (clerical-authoritarians).

The reality is far more complicated.

Part of the problem is a truncated sense of history. For most western commentators, the history of Iran’s troubled relations with the west starts in 1979 with the triumphant return of the glowering Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at the head of the revolution which swept away Shah Reza Pahlavi’s western-backed regime and replaced it with a new Islamic Republic.

Western anxiety was compounded by the 444-day American hostage crisis that helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and humiliated a United States still reeling from defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate crisis. Iran and the United States soon became embroiled in a series of proxy conflicts fought in Iraq, Lebanon, and via terrorist attacks on U.S. targets.

But for many Iranians the country’s troubled relations with the west can be dated further back — to at least the CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.

It marked a crucial turning point in Iranian history, something a bit like the Prague Spring, in which a popular, reforming and democratizing but also nationalist prime minister, who believed Iran should control the exploitation of its own petroleum resources, was removed by western intelligence agencies anxious to protect their countries’ interest in the oilfields.

The Pahlavist regime which replaced Mossadegh may have been modernizing and reforming, but it was also absolutist, dissolute and corrupt, and the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, ruthlessly hunted down and murdered opponents at home and abroad. While Pahlavist exiles abroad promote the memory of a modernizing golden age, there is no enthusiasm for monarchist restoration at home, and the Shah went into exile largely unmourned.

Criticism of the Shah’s regime was never confined just to religious conservatives. Even liberals were critical of the excesses of the Peacock Throne.

Iran therefore has no reason to love the western powers.

Subsequent events have deepened the mutual suspicion. When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched an unprovoked aerial attack on Tehran in 1980 and sent the Iraqi army across the Shatt al-Arab in a brutal war of aggression designed to exploit the turmoil and internal weakness of the fledgling Islamic Republic, the western powers stood aside.

Iraqi forces occupied the oil-rich and strategically vital province of Khuzestan, Iran’s cultural cradle, and captured the half-million strong city of Khorramshahr — and the west did nothing.

When Iran’s regular army and the volunteer forces of the Revolutionary Guard and the basij (the same groups now being used to suppress the protests) drove Iraqi forces back across the border and then moved into the al-Faw peninsula and began to threaten Iraq’s second city of Basra, Iraq resorted to chemical weapons — first the nerve gas sarin and then, when Iranian soldiers were given atropine-filled syringes as an antidote, switching to mustard gas.

Still the west did nothing. In fact, western companies were busy supplying the precursors Iraq needed to make its chemical arsenal and breach the Geneva Protocol. Meanwhile, western intelligence agencies were supplying Iraq with satellite reconnaissance photographs to aid the war effort.  Funding was catalyzed from friendly regional regimes to support Iraq’s faltering war effort and avert the risk of an outright Iranian victory.

To counter Iran’s successes on the ground, Iraq’s air force began strategic bombing of Iran’s cities, then switched to missile attacks on Tehran using Scuds, as Iran suffered its own version of the blitz.

None of this is to suggest Iran did not commit atrocities of its own, or to take Iran’s side over Iraq.

But when western leaders condemn Iran’s alleged quest for “weapons of mass destruction” and fulminate against Iran’s missile program, they betray a startling lack of perspective.

Some estimates put the number of Iranian soldiers who fell victim to chemical weapons as high as 100,000. Total casualties (killed or wounded) are put as high as 1 million. When Iran accepted a UN-mediated ceasefire proposal in 1988, Khomeini not unreasonably likened it to drinking a cup of poison.

Given this history, western leaders are in no position to deliver credible moral lectures, and it is hardly surprising that Iran’s leaders and media mutter darkly about western interference. Nor is it surprising that the Obama administration, seeking to improve relations, has been anxious to avoid the impression of meddling.

– Reese Erlich is a freelance foreign correspondent who covered the Iranian elections and is author of The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis (Polipoint Press) The views expressed are his own. —

Iran is not undergoing a Twitter Revolution. The term simultaneously mischaracterizes and trivializes the important mass movement developing in Iran.

Here’s how it all began. The Iranian government prohibited foreign reporters from traveling outside Tehran without special permission, and later confined them to their hotel rooms and offices. CNN and other cable networks were particularly desperate to find ways to show the large demonstrations and government repression. So they turned to Internet sites such as Facebook and Twitter in a frantic effort to get information. Since reporters were getting most of their information from Tweets and You Tube video clips, the notion of a “Twitter Revolution” was born.

We reporters love a catch phrase and, Twitter being all a flutter in the west, it seemed to fit. It’s a catchy phrase but highly misleading.

First of all the vast majority of Iranians have no access to Twitter. While reporting in Tehran, I personally didn’t encounter anyone who used it regularly. A relatively small number of young, economically well off Iranians do use Twitter. A larger number have access to the Internet. However, in the beginning, most demonstrations were organized through word of mouth, mobile phone calls and text messaging.

But somehow “Text Messaging Revolution” doesn’t have that modern, sexy ring, especially if you have to type it with your thumbs on a tiny keyboard.

More importantly, by focusing on the latest in Internet communications, cable TV networks intentionally or unintentionally characterize a genuine mass movement as something supported mainly by the Twittering classes.

I witnessed tens of thousands of mostly young people coming out into the streets in spontaneous campaign rallies in the days leading up to the election – most of whom had never heard of Twitter.

They shared a common joy not only campaigning for reformist Mirhossein Mousavi, but in being able to freely express themselves for the first time in many years. When the government announced an overwhelming victory for hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only two hours after the polls closed, people became furious.

Over the next few days, hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets in Tehran and cities around the country. They organized silent marches through word of mouth and phone calls since the government had shut down text messaging just prior to the election. Contrary to popular perception, these gatherings included women in chadors, workers and clerics – not just the Twittering classes. Spontaneous marches took place in south Tehran, a decidedly poorer section of town and supposedly a stronghold for Ahmadinejad.

Iranians initially protested what they perceived as massive vote fraud, but that quickly evolved as the protests grew in size and breadth. In the week after the June 14 election, millions of Iranians vented 30 years of pent up anger at a repressive system.

Iranian youth particularly resented President Ahmadinejad’s support for religious militia attacks on unmarried young men and women walking together and against women not covering enough hair with their hijab. Workers resented the 24 percent annual inflation that robbed them of real wage increases. Independent trade unionists had been fighting for decent wages and for the right to organize.

Some demonstrators wanted a more moderate Islamic government. Others advocated a separation of mosque and state, and a return to parliamentary democracy. They are well aware that when Iran had a genuine parliamentary system under Prime Minister Mossadegh, the CIA overthrew it in 1953 in order to promote the Shah as dictator. I didn’t meet any Iranians calling for U.S. intervention; that’s strictly a debate inside the Washington beltway.

Some Iranian friends have asked me why Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei would throw his support behind Ahmadinejad when his presidency was so clearly damaging the country at home and abroad. Initially, Khamenei supported the president because they share common ideological and political positions. Later, the top clerical leaders saw the mass movement that coalesced around Mousavi’s campaign as a direct threat to government stability and their future rule.

Since June 21, the top clerics, military and intelligence services have mobilized their entire apparatus to crush the movement for social and economic change.

The mass movement that sprang forth in the past few weeks has been 30 years in coming. It’s not a Twitter Revolution, nor even a “velvet revolution” like those in Eastern Europe.

It’s a genuine Iranian mass movement made up of students, workers, women, and middle class folks. It may not be strong enough to topple the system today but is sowing the seeds for future struggles.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –

It’s time to kill the international community. The phrase, that is.

Usually shorthand for the governments of “the West,” the phrase is over-used (a Google search produces 447 million hits) and under-thought. It is often misleading and sometimes plain wrong. As in President Barack Obama’s news conference remarks this week on Iran’s post-election crackdown on protest:

“The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the last few days.”

Which international community? Certainly not one that includes the world’s most populous country, China, where there were no signs of outrage. Instead, the Foreign Ministry endorsed the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the choice of the Iranian people and expressed hopes for stability.

Stability in this context means an uninterrupted flow of oil: a month before the Iranian elections and the ensuing turmoil, Iran overtook Saudi Arabia as China’s top supplier of crude. Traders said it might be a one-month blip but the figures highlighted energy-hungry China’s dependence on Iranian oil.

The Chinese government enforced stability at home 20 years ago by gunning down hundreds of anti-government street protesters and sending in tanks to clear Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. To prevent public commemorations of the massacre’s June 4 anniversary, the government blocked Internet sites in a massive censorship operation.

Russia, the only country Ahmadinejad has visited since the disputed elections, showed no signs of being appalled or outraged. Does that mean that China and Russia do not belong to “the international community”? For purposes of international finance, they do — both belong to the G20, the group of finance ministers and central bank governors of the world’s most important economies.

“The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech,” Obama said. “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people.”

Again, which international community? Invoking the term is easier than defining it. If it means governments with an unblemished human rights record, most of the world does not qualify for community membership. If it means democracies, considerably fewer than half the globe’s nation states belong. If it means countries that value democracy more than stability, the community shrinks even further.

If it means, as it usually does, the United States and Europe, the community accounts for less than a fifth of the world’s population. If it means countries that actually take action to stop human disasters, the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, for example, the record is appalling.

DANGEROUS REFERENCE POINT FOR THE NAIVE

Ruth Westwood, a Yale law professor, has described “international community” as “a dangerous reference point for the naive” because, she says, its connotation of commitment invites unwise reliance on others by those who must ultimately fend for themselves.

By logic, the term should belong to the United Nations, whose founding charter, drawn up in San Francisco a month after the end of World War Two, spelt out a shared vision for a better world and pledged to prevent wars, observe fundamental human rights, respect international treaties and promote better standards of life.

But the label “international community” is almost never applied to the United Nations, whose 192 member states include the world’s worst violators of human rights and international law. Think Zimbabwe. Think Sudan. Think Myanmar. If the United Nations represented the collective will of the world, that will often runs counter to the United States, which sees itself as the engine of the “international community.”

In General Assembly votes on contentious issues such as the U.S. embargo on Cuba or Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the United States tends to stand virtually alone.

The “international community” usually erupts into outrage after people in the developed world see shocking images of man’s inhumanity to man on their television or computer screens. In China, it was the image of a lone protester in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks. In Iran, it was a short amateur video clip of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, bleeding to death in a Tehran street after being shot by a sniper.

So perhaps the term international community rightly belongs not to the United States and Europe, nor to an institution with an address on Manhattan’s East River, but to the global network of Internet-savvy citizens (and reporters) who circumvent government censorship at great risk to provide the information that sparks the outrage.

So, how to get rid of the phrase in its standard amorphous usage? To start with, media organizations could discourage it (some already do). As to politicians: there’s always the option to ask for clarification. Yes, there’s outrage, Mr. President, but exactly who is the international community?

You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com.

– Flynt Leverett directs The New America Foundation’s Iran Project and teaches international affairs at Pennsylvania State university. Hillary Mann Leverett is CEO of STRATEGA, a political risk consultancy. Both worked for many years on Middle East issues for the U.S. government, including as members of the National Security Council staff. The views expressed are their own. —

This article originally appeared on Politico.com.

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud.

They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The shock of the “Iran experts” over Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.

Although Iran’s elections are not free by Western standards, the Islamic Republic has a 30-year history of highly contested and competitive elections at the presidential, parliamentary and local levels. Manipulation has always been there, as it is in many other countries.
But upsets occur — as, most notably, with Mohammed Khatami’s surprise victory in the 1997 presidential election. Moreover, “blowouts” also occur — as in Khatami’s reelection in 2001,
Ahmadinejad’s first victory in 2005 and, we would argue, this year.

Like much of the Western media, most American “Iran experts” overstated Mirhossein Mousavi’s “surge” over the campaign’s final weeks. More important, they were oblivious — as in 2005 — to Ahmadinejad’s effectiveness as a populist politician and campaigner. American “Iran experts” missed how Ahmadinejad was perceived by most Iranians as having won the nationally televised debates with his three opponents — especially his debate with Mousavi.

Before the debates, both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad campaign aides indicated privately that they perceived a surge of support for Mousavi; after the debates, the same aides concluded that Ahmadinejad’s provocatively impressive performance and Mousavi’s desultory one had boosted the incumbent’s standing. Ahmadinejad’s charge that Mousavi was supported by Rafsanjani’s sons — widely perceived in Iranian society as corrupt figures — seemed to play well with voters.

Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s criticism that Mousavi’s reformist supporters, including Khatami, had been willing to suspend Iran’s uranium enrichment program and had won nothing from the West for doing so tapped into popular support for the program — and had the added advantage of being true.

More fundamentally, American “Iran experts” consistently underestimated Ahmadinejad’s base of support. Polling in Iran is notoriously difficult; most polls there are less than fully professional and, hence, produce results of questionable validity. But the one poll conducted before Friday’s election by a Western organization that was transparent about its methodology — a telephone poll carried out by the Washington-based Terror-Free Tomorrow from May 11 to 20 — found Ahmadinejad running 20 points ahead of Mousavi. This poll was conducted before the televised debates in which, as noted above, Ahmadinejad was perceived to have done well while Mousavi did poorly.

American “Iran experts” assumed that “disastrous” economic conditions in Iran would undermine Ahmadinejad’s reelection prospects. But the International Monetary Fund projects that Iran’s economy will actually grow modestly this year (when the economies of most Gulf Arab states are in recession).

A significant number of Iranians — including the religiously pious, lower-income groups, civil servants and pensioners — appear to believe that Ahmadinejad’s policies have benefited them.

And, while many Iranians complain about inflation, the TFT poll found that most Iranian voters do not hold Ahmadinejad responsible. The “Iran experts” further argue that the high turnout on June 12 — 82 percent of the electorate — had to favor Mousavi. But this line of analysis reflects nothing more than assumptions.

Some “Iran experts” argue that Mousavi’s Azeri background and “Azeri accent” mean that he was guaranteed to win Iran’s Azeri-majority provinces; since Ahmadinejad did better than Mousavi in these areas, fraud is the only possible explanation.

But Ahmadinejad himself speaks Azeri quite fluently as a consequence of his eight years serving as a popular and successful official in two Azeri-majority provinces; during the campaign, he artfully quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry — in the original — in messages designed to appeal to Iran’s Azeri community. (And we should not forget that the supreme leader is Azeri.) The notion that Mousavi was somehow assured of victory in Azeri-majority provinces is simply not grounded in reality.

With regard to electoral irregularities, the specific criticisms made by Mousavi — such as running out of ballot paper in some precincts and not keeping polls open long enough (even though polls stayed open for at least three hours after the announced closing time) — could not, in themselves, have tipped the outcome so clearly in Ahmadinejad’s favor.

Moreover, these irregularities do not, in themselves, amount to electoral fraud even by American legal standards. And, compared with the U.S. presidential election in Florida in 2000, the flaws in Iran’s electoral process seem less significant.

In the wake of Friday’s election, some “Iran experts” — perhaps feeling burned by their misreading of contemporary political dynamics in the Islamic Republic — argue that we are witnessing a “conservative coup d’état,” aimed at a complete takeover of the Iranian state.

But one could more plausibly suggest that if a “coup” is being attempted, it has been mounted by the losers in Friday’s election. It was Mousavi, after all, who declared victory on Friday even before Iran’s polls closed. And three days before the election, Mousavi supporter Rafsanjani published a letter criticizing the leader’s failure to rein in Ahmadinejad’s resort to “such ugly and sin-infected phenomena as insults, lies and false allegations.” Many Iranians took this letter as an indication that the Mousavi camp was concerned their candidate had fallen behind in the campaign’s closing days.

In light of these developments, many politicians and “Iran experts” argue that the Obama administration cannot now engage the “illegitimate” Ahmadinejad regime. Certainly, the administration should not appear to be trying to “play” in the current controversy in Iran about the election. In this regard, President Barack Obama’s comments on Friday, a few hours before the polls closed in Iran, that “just as has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well is that you’re seeing people looking at new possibilities” was extremely maladroit.

From Tehran’s perspective, this observation undercut the credibility of Obama’s acknowledgment, in his Cairo speech earlier this month, of U.S. complicity in overthrowing a democratically elected Iranian government and restoring the shah in 1953.

The Obama administration should vigorously rebut any argument against engaging Tehran following Friday’s vote. More broadly, Ahmadinejad’s victory may force Obama and his senior advisers to come to terms with the deficiencies and internal contradictions in their approach to Iran. Before the Iranian election, the Obama administration had fallen for the same illusion as many of its predecessors — the illusion that Iranian politics is primarily about personalities and finding the right personality to deal with. That is not how Iranian politics works.

The Islamic Republic is a system with multiple power centers; within that system, there is a strong and enduring consensus about core issues of national security and foreign policy, including Iran’s nuclear program and relations with the United States. Any of the four candidates in Friday’s election would have continued the nuclear program as Iran’s president; none would agree to its suspension.

Any of the four candidates would be interested in a diplomatic opening with the United States, but that opening would need to be comprehensive, respectful of Iran’s legitimate national security interests and regional importance, accepting of Iran’s right to develop and benefit from the full range of civil nuclear technology — including pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle — and aimed at genuine rapprochement.

Such an approach would also, in our judgment, be manifestly in the interests of the United States and its allies throughout the Middle East. It is time for the Obama administration to get serious about pursuing this approach — with an Iranian administration headed by the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

© 2009 Capitol News Company LLC

Picture top right: A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi holds up a photograph of him while attending a rally in Tehran June 15, 2009. REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl

Picture top left: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looks on during his first news conference after the presidential elections in Tehran June 14, 2009. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

-- Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi is a British-Iranian based in London, and sometimes Tehran. The opinions expressed are her own. --

The images of a human chain along the 12 kilometres of Tehran’s main artery, Vali-Asr, has given me a gut-wrenching urge to book a flight to Tehran, to take part in what seems to be a historical moment, or what is at least being constructed as such.

Instead I have been busy scouring articles in English-language media describing the public mobilisation for the two leading candidates, Mir Hossein Moussavi and the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the largest political mobilisation of the public since the revolution in 1979. I wasn’t there then. The electric energy coursing through the city has also been likened to the atmosphere during the world cup in 1998. Nope, wasn’t there then either.

This is the predicament of Diaspora; caring about a place that you might rarely be in, wanting to understand events that you are miles apart from. But in 2009, it is easy to keep up with far away events by the magical means of the internet.

My constant online status has meant that Facebook, YouTube and Skype have been key ways in which I have kept in touch with what has been happening. Facebook provides a dominant source of photos, videos and links, plus nightly Skype chats with friends and family has helped me to understand what the opinions and atmosphere on the street is really like. Not able to watch the first ever televised debates between candidates live, YouTube has been the next best thing.

While the use of cyber-space has been key for campaigning, primarily for Ahamdinejad’s main rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and a means by which we can stay engaged in this presidential race, it has also been used to directly motivate Iranians outside of Iran to vote. An inspiring video filmed across major world cities featuring Iranians holding up signs in Farsi and English with the slogan "we vote" has been doing the rounds.

My inbox has also been inundated with emails from numerous individuals inside Iran with details of where to vote in the UK, U.S. and elsewhere. We are being asked to not sit idle simply watching the events unfold in recent weeks, but to demonstrate that we care about Iran’s future and participate. I, for one, will do just that and suggest that us in Diaspora should dust of our Iranian passports, and on June 12, finally put them to good use.

While we might not be able to march down Vali-Asr, we can certainly march to the embassy and cast our vote.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

A wind of change is blowing through Iran, where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faces an increasingly tough battle for re-election on Friday.

Whether or not Ahmadinejad fends off reformist Mirhossein Moussavi and two other candidates after a turbulent campaign, Iran is likely to be more open to talks with the United States on a possible “grand bargain” to end 30 years of hostility. Tehran will not give up its nuclear program, whoever wins. But it may be persuaded to stop short of testing or making a bomb.

There is a sense of deja vu about this election.

In 1997, a soft-spoken reformist, Mohammad Khatami, swept to a surprise landslide victory over the establishment candidate, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, on a tide of young people and women clamoring for greater freedom. But after his supporters won control of parliament, the conservative clerical establishment used unelected institutions in Iran’s complex power system to neutralize Khatami and block his liberal agenda.

There is, however, a crucial difference this time.

The United States, which had a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq at the time, never seized the opportunity of Khatami’s victory to open a dialogue. Now, U.S. President Barack Obama is waiting with an outstretched hand and has made crucial gestures by accepting the Islamic Republic by its name, offering talks without pre-conditions and admitting Washington’s role in ousting nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953.

Obama’s respectful overtures in his Cairo speech calling for a new start with the Muslim world have played into the Iranian campaign.

Moussavi, a graying architect who was prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has become the unlikely standard bearer of a mass movement for change. Tehran is teeming nightly with green-clad young men and women demonstrating joyously against the fundamentalist Ahmadinejad. It will be hard to get the genie back into the bottle even if the incumbent wins.

The president is only number two in the hierarchy after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all foreign policy and national security decisions, especially on the nuclear program, and controls the elite Revolutionary Guards.

The president is constrained by other powerful bodies such as the conservative judiciary, the Guardian Council, which can veto legislation and bar election candidates on Islamic grounds, and the Expediency Council, which arbitrates differences among the institutions and is headed by influential ex-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Policymaking involves endless bargaining among multiple stakeholders, but the supreme leader is the ultimate arbiter. For example, he is believed to have vetoed a proposal by Iran’s nuclear negotiator in 2006 to accept a temporary freeze on expanding uranium enrichment in order to launch negotiations with major powers represented by the EU’s Javier Solana.

While both main candidates say the nuclear program is irreversible, Ahmadinejad has ruled out further negotiations while Moussavi has advocated fresh talks.

Khamenei has endorsed Ahmadinejad’s re-election bid, but he is sensitive to public opinion and must be deeply worried by rifts that have opened in the establishment during the campaign.

The fissures were dramatized when Rafsanjani accused Ahmadinejad of lying and demanded that the leader call the president to order for airing corruption allegations against Rafsanjani during a televised debate. The ex-president warned Khamenei there could be an explosive situation after the election if he did not “extinguish the fire”.

This does not mean that Iran is on the brink of another revolution. The Islamic system is deeply rooted and the security forces have shown in the past they act swiftly and ruthlessly to crush any challenge.

Khamenei’s chief aim is to ensure the Islamic system’s survival. Public pressure for change and heightened factional tension should convince him, despite his deep suspicion of the United States, that it is worth exploring a deal with Obama.

Many experts believe that by completing the nuclear fuel cycle under international supervision, but without testing or building a weapon, Iran can deter its enemies and entrench its regional influence without incurring an Israeli or American strike. To spurn Obama’s offer and press ahead with an unsupervised nuclear program would invite such intervention and could put the regime’s survival at risk.

So whoever wins the vote, it could be “game on” in Tehran.