“Iran is definitely in Obama’s sights. He has ceased courting it, and is girding for the confrontation. But not yet. … Last year was the year of public relations; 2010 is the year of pressure. The crushing blow that comes after the pressure will not be dealt before next year.”

“The year of public relations” — that’s what worries me. Did Obama “court” Iran not because he wanted a deal — whether a narrow deal on uranium enrichment, or a broader deal leading to warmer relations — but as a gesture designed to fail? Did he set out merely to show the world that he was being reasonable, that he offered his hand and Iran refused? If that is the case, the failure will now be used to isolate Iran even further, softening world public opinion for military action down the road — once punitive sanctions, too, have been tried and failed.

The Ha’aretz writer I cited above thinks he can read Obama’s mind. He believes that Obama has given up on negotiations and will attack Iran, but is waiting until after the November elections for political reasons. I’m not so sure, but I do worry. Washington has limited its outreach to Tehran to a single issue — an all-or-nothing uranium swap — and now keeps repeating how unimpressed they are with Tehran’s attempts to meet them halfway. (Iran is willing to do a swap, but not all at once, rather in stages over several months.) Negotiations are at a stalemate, and the U.S. is busy rallying the global powers to punish Iran through sanctions. Meanwhile, Congress has passed its own sanctions bill by an overwhelming vote. Unless the game changes suddenly due to an Iranian popular revolution in the next few months — which won’t happen — it increasingly looks like the stage is being set, and consciously so, for a military showdown in 2011 as Ha’aretz claims.

What has Iran done to deserve this? Its leaders have said repeatedly they don’t want a nuclear weapon. Western intelligence has found no evidence that they are pursuing a weapon. Stories were planted in Western newspapers claiming that the Iranians are testing some sort of nuclear detonator, but these stories have been shown to be false. Iran’s uranium enrichment program is well within its rights under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and they are cooperating with IAEA inspectors. I don’t understand the justification — moral, strategic, or otherwise — for a showdown with Iran.

If it’s true that Obama has already made up his mind to attack Iran, that would prove him to be even more duplicitous than I already know him to be. The condescension of pretending to want peace, while preparing for war — I’ve perceived it in him since his Nobel Peace Prize speech. But if he goes so far as to attack Iran, a country that has done nothing to the U.S., after pledging to reach out — may he be condemned by history, may he be buried in shame.

Of course, I may be jumping the gun. Perhaps the Ha’aretz columnist is projecting his own fantasies onto Obama. My own fears, too, could be wrong — I certainly hope so. If Obama decides to negotiate sincerely, without preconditions as he promised during his campaign, far-ranging breakthroughs are possible, instead of this senseless division. Or maybe Russia and China will make the price of military action too high. Or maybe the U.S. will blunder into the bloody chaos of its third Middle East war. I guess we’ll know soon enough — in another year or two.

— • —

Here’s Iranian rapper Salome calling for the Iranian people to remain united regardless of “family” differences — since there are those trying to exploit those differences “who don’t care about us.” This addresses itself to those in Washington who hope a “Green Revolution” will play to its advantage, as well as to opportunists in Iran hoping to use the divisions to gain power. (Thanks to Lenin’s Tomb for the link.)

It’s clear that the reactions of Iranian society to the events of recent weeks, and to the pressures these events have placed on them, haven’t followed a clear logic either in favor of the individual or in favor of the Iranian authorities. It’s true that there has been violence against the demonstrators, but there has also been a destruction of private property which the police are responsible for protecting. For this reason, whether we are for these demonstrations or against them, if we are sincere we mustn’t betray our belief in the liberating and pacifying potential of reason and communication.

Before these events the West had the greatest difficulty in understanding the Iranian people, their way of thinking and their view of the world, and the Western media put their energies into perpetuating a distorted image such as the one presented in the American film Not Without My Daughter—but now all of a sudden everything is reversed, and the majority of Iranians are progressives who support the open, liberal vision of the reformer Mousavi. But are Mousavi’s ideas really as friendly to the West as they seem?

We need to remember that Mousavi is part of the overall Iranian system, even if he now claims that if he had succeeded in the presidential elections, the Revolutionary Guard would have launched a coup against him! We mustn’t forget that in the early days of the revolution he was the editor of the official journal of the Islamic Republican Party, then foreign minister and finally prime minister from 1981–1989 under the presidency of Ali Khomeini, who is none other than the current Supreme Leader of the Revolution, the highest post in the republic. Mousavi chose not to run for the presidency in 1997 when his reformist ally Mohammed Khatami was elected and then reelected by a significant margin, which goes to show that the reformers are part of the Islamic system and have been playing a direct role in it for years, even though the Islamic revolution is only 30 years old! That is why in normal circumstances the West would not support Mousavi today even with words, simply because he doesn’t share their values and goals.

We can say that the West is more against Ahmadinejad than it is for Mousavi. Indeed it is against the system in general and for civil disorder, for well-known reasons. It is hardly obvious that Western call for liberty and for demonstrations, mixed with the indirect call for an uprising against the Iranian system, is in the best interests of the Iranian people, who in my view are an open and tolerant people despite the stereotypic image we see in the media.

In my opinion we need to be vigilant if we want to understand objectively what is currently happening in Iran, because there is always the possibility of hidden interests that want to manipulate the system to their own private ends. We may agree with someone who tells us that gambling destroys the social life of the people, but never with someone who loses everything in the casino and then tells us the same thing!

Meanwhile, from the behavior of the Iranian state — arrests of opposition figures, a crackdown on communications, threats of “bloodshed and chaos” if the opposition doesn’t back down — it seems obvious that they have something to hide. They are acting threatened and cornered, not like their preferred candidate has just won a landslide victory.

Would a regime that enjoys broad popular support be acting like this (watch video) or this?

One of the things that stands out in these events is the courage of Iranian women, who have been in the front lines of the resistance from the beginning. Another is the inability of the major media to keep up with the story, and their dependence on citizen reporters on sites like YouTube and Twitter. Finally, there is the fact that while this is playing out before the eyes of the world, this is an Iranian struggle that must be won by the Iranians themselves. There is little the rest of us can do except bear witness as President Obama said yesterday.

Here is an excellent piece by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who has somehow managed to be on the ground in Teheran, and who eloquently captures the essence of this dangrous, inspiring moment.

My best wishes to the Iranian people in their struggle for justice.

I’ve now found anecdotal evidence to back up this idea. Blogger south/south spoke with her Iranian grandmother, herself no Ahmadinejad supporter, around 48 hours after the election, and posted their conversation. The grandmother explains that the televised debates leading up to the election turned people against Ahmadinejad’s chief opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, rather than toward him as the Western media have assumed. Mousavi’s connection to former president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani also didn’t help, because Rafsanjani is widely seen as a “shark,” a manipulator and profiteer. Finally, Ahmadinejad spent his last term cultivating the image of a humble, down-to-earth person who raises his own food. He won in a landslide among the rural poor because he made a show of addressing their concerns. The other campaigns were focused in the cities, but as the grandmother put it:

What about the provinces? We don’t have too few of them. Ahmadinejad went to the provinces and reached out to the poor. People there still worry about buttering their bread. He went to every single one….

Iran is not Tehran, Tehran isn’t even the size of the eye of the needle. Every single countryside, province, Ahmadinejad had them…. He worked for four years holding babies and making visits to the countrside. You could have predicted these results.

So in watching coverage of this election and the protests taking place now, it may be helpful to question the assumptions of the Western media from which we get most of our information. While there are surely millions of Iranians who yearn for European-style progressive democracy, there are many millions more for whom “buttering their bread” is the first concern. And for those people, whether we like it or not, Ahmadinejad is their man.

My thanks to neufneuf and homeyra for the grandmother link. Also from neufneuf, in a similar vein, is this article by former NSC staffers Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett entitled, “Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It.”

No more lounging around the house in a leisurely way for me! Today I hit the road, first to visit friends in New York, then on to Paris, and finally Morocco before the end of the month. Watch this space as eatbees blog “goes live” from Morocco and around the world!

Also, best wishes to the Iranian people on today’s presidential election. The current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is running again, but there is talk that major change is coming. For one thing, women and young people are participating in unpredecented numbers. Go here for an slideshow of the colorful rallies that have taken place in recent weeks, and here for live updates from the ground in Tehran.

The Qur’an emphasizes an individual’s personal responsibility for his actions. The idea is that God gave us the Qur’an as a complete understanding—well, it’s not a complete understanding, but it’s all that human beings would need to understand about God…so we are required to interpret it for ourselves…because another thing that the Qur’an emphasizes is that no one is going to stand in for us on Judgment Day. We are each going to face God alone based on our own actions. It’s like the Christian idea that all people are created equal in the eyes of God—this is the basis for the democratic system. So I don’t see any contradiction between Islamic ideas and democracy or the responsibilities of individuals within a democratic system to define right and wrong. I don’t think the imam can do it for us, and I don’t think the Qur’an has answers to every possible situation…. It’s sort of like when Christians ask “What would Jesus do?” They use that analogy, but Jesus didn’t do everything possible. He did some things, so they say, “What would he do in this other situation that we don’t have any record of him being in, based on the situations that we do know about?” It’s the same thing. The Qur’an doesn’t give instructions for every possible situation. We have to be our own judges. I think this is consistent with a democracy. I think the religious influence from the mosque about specific customs and festivals…that’s a private affair that is separate from the running of the state. When you get to the bottom of the state, each individual has his conscience based on his moral system just like a Christian, a Jew, or even a pagan would.

If you are a Moroccan blogger (or blog about Morocco) and would like to participate in Reb’s project, feel free to contact her by e-mail. You can also find more information about her project in this interview she did with Jillian York of Global Voices.

Oh, and I got an award! The real honor isn’t the award itself, but that it was offered to me by the always discerning Homeyra, who blogs about culture and politics from Tehran. Don’t miss this chance to get to know Homeyra and the other folks she considers Kick Ass Bloggers. (There are five of us.) Trust me, Homeyra’s friends should be yours as well.

I’m supposed to pass this award on, so I will tag Hicham, Reda, Mounir, Bouba and Ayoub. All of these bloggers have inspired me repeatedly with their thought-provoking posts. If some of them have been sleeping lately, it’s not my fault! And here’s the obligatory link to the originator of the Kick Ass meme.

I still felt bad for Hillary because of her fighting spirit, and because I had no doubt that she would make an excellent president. However, rather than dying with dignity, her campaign has been acting ever more mean-spirited and bizarre. Hillary herself has said a number of things over the last two weeks that truly scare me, forcing me to question her thinking and reconsider the respect for her that I once had.

I have in mind three quotes in particlular. The first was in response to a question about how she would respond if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. Rather than challenging the question as absurd, speculative, or warmongering, she said this.

I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. … Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program, in the next ten years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.

Next, after proposing a summer “gas tax holiday” that economists of all political stripes have criticized as useless or counterproductive, she was asked to name a single expert who supports her plan. She responded by attacking the very idea that experts have a role in shaping policy.

I’m not going to put my lot in with economists. … We’ve been, for the last seven years, seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans.

Finally, while making the argument that she could do better than Obama against John McCain in November, because Obama supposedly has failed to win the confidence of white working-class voters, she said this.

Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and…whites in both states [Indiana and North Carolina] who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here.

In other words, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to win her party’s nomination, Hillary is painting herself as more warlike towards Iran and less interested in listening to experts than even George W. Bush. On top of that, she has indulged in racial chauvinism, joining the terms “hard-working Americans” and “white Americans” in a way that makes it sound like non-white Americans don’t like to work.

There is no doubt in my mind, I voted the right way. Barack Obama has run the nobler campaign, the campaign that will bring the biggest change from the Bush years, and on top of that, the winning campaign. I’m just waiting for Hillary to leave the stage so we can move on to the national debate we need to have before starting a new era in 2009.

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Fred Kaplan gets to the point in Slate:

Skeptics of war have rarely been so legitimized. Vice President Cheney has never been so isolated. If Bush were to order an attack under these circumstances, he would risk a major eruption in the chain of command, even a constitutional crisis, among many other crises. It seems extremely unlikely that even he would do that.

As a lifelong progressive, I’ve tended to see the CIA and the military as institutions made up of people who carry out repressive actions against poor, vulnerable nations. But if there’s one thing the Bush administration has taught me, it’s that there are times when they are the only rational actors in a position to do anything. It’s an irony for progressives today that we find ourselves cheering the CIA for showing independence from an administration willing to “fix the facts around the policy,” or the military’s top brass for letting it be known behind the scenes that they will not carry out an order to attack Iran.

I’m not suddenly convinced that the U.S. has stopped being a predatious empire, but just for today I want to say, “Thank you, CIA, and thank you, intelligence community, for taking a stand against war!”

Looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process…[that] has been called, rightly, Islamization. … In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, “schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils….” But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional values of the West…. Yet rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly giving in to the Muslims’ outrageous demands. … Already some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.

Our friend Norman Podhoretz is more than a solitary crank, he is a founding father of neoconservatism and a key foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential frontrunner Rudolph Guiliani. I was wondering what he meant by “some observers,” so I googled “Eurabia,” a term I had never heard before, though it conjures for me the kind of racial paranoia that caused white supremacists of a century ago to go crazy about the Yellow Peril. I’m an innocent, I guess, because I wonder honestly, would it be so bad to live in a Europe full of Arabs, Turks and Pakistanis? to blend in marketplace or on the Metro with people wearing the traditional clothing of those lands, or hear the Islamic call to prayer in European streets? I guess I’m just a traitor to my race, because I could even imagine my own children belonging to such a “foreign” culture, only first I need to find the right partner, it’s not something I can do alone. The fear-mongering is lost on me.

Anyway, the first thing that came up in my google search was the book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by “the world’s preeminent historian of Islam,” Bat Ye’or. (Never heard of her? Me neither.) She has coined the term “dhimmitude” to refer to the supposedly humiliating condition of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, a situation that she feels has already destroyed Europe, with the U.S. in danger of being next.

Eurabia cannot change direction; it can only use deception to mask its emergence, its bias and its inevitable trajectory. Eurabia’s destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States…. Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people.

For those who want it, here is a collection of links to articles by and about Bat Ye’or, and the Eurabia concept. Here is the wikipedia article that defines Eurabia as “a scenario where Europe allies itself and eventually merges with the Arab world.” Here is a profile from The New Yorker of Oriana Fallaci, another proponent of the Eurabia concept, who accused Muslims in The Force of Reason of “invading and conquering and subjugating” Europe. She called it “the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created.”

I don’t want to go any further with this for now, because I feel like I’m digging in a nest of maggots. It astonishes me that such views could exist at all, and even more so that they seem to be the dominant view in the West. In my view, it isn’t an Islamic invasion that is destroying Western culture. Our culture of tolerance and enlightenment is being eroded from within by people like Podhoretz, Ye’or and Fallaci who refuse to adapt to the diversity of the global era.

We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide. These myths have failed because they… have not been infused with the spirit of compassion [and] respect for the sacredness of all life…. These destructive mythologies have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, an attempt to exalt the self by demonising the other. Any such myth has failed modernity, which has created a global village in which all human beings now find themselves in the same predicament. We cannot counter these myths with reason alone, because logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a “resource.” This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

Speaking of myths, allow me to recommend a couple of videos about what we might call the dark side of myth. Myth can be used in a political context to short-circuit reason and manipulate human behavior through emotional appeals. The first, a series of three hour-long segments aired on the BBC in 2005, is called The Power of Nightmares. It concerns the strange parallels between American neoconservatism, represented by people like Richard Perle and William Kristol, and Islamic extremism, represented by Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The second video, called Once Upon a Time in Iran (available here in a different format), follows a group of Iranian pilgrims to the shrine of Karbala in Iraq, where the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein died 1300 years ago at the hands of the caliph Yazid. It shows how Hussein’s resistance to tyranny helped to inspire Khomeini’s revolution against the Shah, seen as a modern Yazid, and is today informing the rhetoric of those who see Bush as yet another manifestation of Yezid’s spirit of tyranny.

As Karen Armstrong points out, “we are myth-making creatures,” so it would be a mistake to believe we can do away with myths and survive in the world on reason alone. We tried this in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it didn’t lead to the promised era of equality and peace. The only solution seems to be to stay alert to the myths that saturate our environment. Myths that reinforce our existing beliefs are the most effective, because we don’t even notice them. It’s easy for an American to recognize the story of Hussein and Yazid as a myth, though it is based on historical fact, but we are uncritical our own myth of America as a beacon of liberty for the world. Faced with so many myths, the most creative response is to become mythmakers ourselves. We must never forget that we have the power to appropriate myths, adapt them, attack them, talk back to them, rework them and make them our own.