I've been saying that Iran is the main event since May 2006: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-May/009968.html>.
> >So should the United States change its mind and seek an
> >accommodation, Putin stands perfect ready to betray the Iranians'
> >confidence.
> >
> >For a price.
Yes.* But Washington is cheap,** its subprime economy is losing the confidence of an increasing number of institutional and individual investors, and yet it nevertheless likes to fight on multiple fronts all at the same time. I bet the Islamists of Iran have thought about the nature of their "friends," "foes," and "neutrals." Jomhuri-e Eslami, really far-out as it sometimes is, can be very shrewd,*** especially when it's fighting for its very survival.
Besides, Iran itself is not unlike a femme fatale. She is at times cruel, but ravishing all the same, so well endowed is she with nature's gifts. She will probably stab you in the back at the very first opportunity, and yet she stirs the flesh of all men and women, whether they are on the left, right, or center, who are politically ambitious, like Chavez, HRC, and Putin. Yes, she really has a way of making you believe that, if you have her, you can, perhaps, rule the world. Who will have her, and on what terms? Or will she just play them all and seduce them into getting her what she wants, giving up little in return? That's the Great Game in which she is both a ruthless player and the most precious prize.
* Nazila Fathi, "Putin Is Said to Offer Idea on Standoff over Iran," 18 October 2007, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/middleeast/18iran.html>.
** <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0b22658-7ce8-11dc-aee2-0000779fd2ac.html> US offers Putin deal over missile shield
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and James Blitz and Stephen Fidler in Brussels
Published: October 17 2007 20:58 | Last updated: October 18 2007 02:31
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A senior US defence official said Washington would continue negotiating with Poland and the Czech Republic towards building the missile defence installations. But he said the US was willing to leave the system switched off until the US and Russia had jointly validated that Iranian ballistic missiles posed a threat.
"It is our intention to proceed with the construction of missile defence in Europe," said Geoff Morrell, Pentagon spokesman. "But the pace at which it becomes operational could be adjusted to meet the threat."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The US made several proposals on missile defence in Moscow which Mr Lavrov said were interesting. But he stressed that Russia was adamantly opposed to placing the shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, which suggests that compromise will be difficult to reach.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mr Putin said again this week that Russia did not take the view that Iran was seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The US said the threat posed by Tehran's nuclear and missiles programme is the main reason to build a Europe-based missile defence system.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Russia has conditioned any co-operation on the US stopping talks with Poland and the Czech Republic. It has also put forward its own proposal to integrate the Garbala radar in Azerbaijan into the US missile defence system instead of the Czech radar. But the US says the radars are different types, and says Garbala can only complement, not replace, the X-band tracking radar in the Czech Republic.
*** James Glanz, "Iraqi Contracts With Iran and China Concern U.S.," 18 October 2007, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/middleeast/18grid.html>.
On 10/17/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 17, 2007, at 2:08 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > The struggle today is not so much between the "Left" and the "Right"
> > -- terms that are difficult to apply in many nations -- as between
> > those who know what time it is and those who don't. Putin does, but
> > most Western leftists -- who, lacking in the vision thing, are more
> > reactionary in the proper sense of the term than even Islamists
> > dreaming of a Caliphate -- don't.
>
> As I was walking down the street one day
> A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was
> on my watch, yeah
> And I said
> Does anybody really know what time it is
> I don't
Chicago, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" 1970.
Near the end of the long sixties -- that's just about the last time when secular leftists thought they knew what time it was.
This is the way Iran's power elite, from Khatami to Ahmadinejad to Khamenei, think about Marxism today, and their words could as well have been spoken by most liberals and leftists in the West, excepting those of us who think that historical materialism, if done right, still has much to give to the world:
The Zionist regime openly and audaciously made
threats to assassinate, kill and plunder, and notorious
terrorists took power one after another in this regime,
the last of whom was the infamous butcher of 'Sabra
and Shatila'. For tens of years, the usurper Zionist
regime remained on the scene of Palestine with a
violent, inflexible and invincible face.
On the opposite front, following initial weakness and
abjection and failure of the half-done efforts of early
years, various ideologies from pan-Arabism and
nationalism to leftist views such as Marxism and the
like were put to the test, and they all proved to be
unsuccessful in practice. ("Leader's Address to the
3rd Intl. Conference on the Holy Quds and Support
for the Palestinian People's Rights," 14 April 2006, <http://www.khamenei.ir/EN/Speech/detail.jsp?id=20060414A>)
The nineteenth century was also the century for the
advent of ideologies, which although they shared in
their worries about the new situation, differed in their
desired vision of life. The most famous of these
ideologies was, perhaps, that which was offered by
Marx and his colleagues. Marx may have offered a
good diagnosis of the pathologies of the capitalist
system; but he proved not to be a good physician
when it came to curing the disease. His prescription
even added to the depth and intensity of the disease.
Marx's prescription was tested in Russia and China,
with certain variations, but the result was new
polarizations in the political geography of the world,
leading to new rounds of tension and anxiety. What
was embraced, and even sanctified, by new
ideologies against the unscrupulous violence of the
claimants of freedom inside and outside the
geographical borders of modernity was violence itself,
which, in the name of revolution, determined another
destiny for the violence-stricken humanity.
Despite the predictions of its founders, Marxism did
not materialize in the most advanced industrial
societies. But it alerted these societies to some of
the threats that could destroy them; hence their
clever efforts to reform their economic, political,
legal and even civil systems in order to guarantee
the survival of liberal-democracy. Meanwhile,
exploitation of man by man, which was essential to
the survival and growth of capitalism, continued in
new forms, and predominantly by relocation from
the bilateral relationship of the exploiter and the
exploited to the scene of a new world system. As a
result of this development, the new rival of the
Western bourgeoisie, instead of emancipating the
nations, turned the countries that followed it into its
sphere of colonial and exploitative influence.
("Address of H.E Seyed Mohammad Khatami for
VIIIth World Assembly of Religions for Peace,"
Kyoto, Japan, 26 August 2006, <http://www.khatami.ir/lecture.php?uid=15&lang=en>)
The Israeli occupation remains; state socialism has been abandoned, first of all by the Communist Party elite; and capitalism has grown, continually displacing its most exorbitant social and environmental costs from its center to its periphery. There is a truth in what liberals and Islamists, for once in agreement, say, which cannot and should not be denied. Liberals have their vision, and so do Islamists. Do secular leftists?
On 10/17/07, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> No, I don't know what time it is. It's time for you to stop fuckin' with me!"
>
> Richard Pryor
Then, there's another question: are secular leftists fuckable?
The contrast between the ailing, ill-equipped and ill-fed
fighters of the old "secular" factions and muscular,
bearded and well-equipped jihadis is huge.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Saleh is sitting with his friends under a poster of another
dead leader. He is 20 years old, but he looks 16. His
hair is dyed orange-blond on top. A small wooden map
of Palestine hangs around his neck. "This is from inside,"
he says, referring to the parts of Palestine that became
Israel in 1948 - a mythical place for those in exile so long.
"From Jaffa." He holds tightly to the little piece of wood
as if it is a piece of Christ's cross.
Like most of the young men here he is unemployed and
had dropped out from school when he was 12. He joined
the Marxist Palestinian group the PFLP; his father, uncle
and mother were all communist.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I walk to Saleh's house. The walls are bare concrete
blocks, and his mother, a former leftwing revolutionary,
is sitting in the courtyard peeling potatoes. A hijab is
tightly wrapped round her head.
Saleh's room tells the story of all the revolutions and
defeats in the Middle East. It is tiny - three by two
metres.
There is a small bronze bust of Lenin, a red flag, a
picture of Che Guevara and two portraits of Hassan
Nasrallah, the head of the Shia Islamic group Hizbullah.
It might be surprising that a secular leftist could be so
enamoured of a religious party such as Hizbullah, but
this is common throughout Lebanon and the Middle
East. "He is our hero now," he says, pointing at the
cleric with his black turban and bushy beard.
Saleh's journey is explained to me a few days later
when I meet another Palestinian in Beirut, a fighter in
his 50s and a hard-core Marxist, his face is lined with
wrinkles. "I have never lost my political compass," he
says. "Wherever the Americans and the Israelis are, I
am on the other side. So if Hizbullah and the Iranians
and the Islamists are against the Americans now, so I
am an Islamist." (Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, "'Escape Is
Impossible,'" 12 June 2007, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2100663,00.html>)
No sex appeal, no social revolution.
In the temporary marriage between Islam and historical materialism that I envision, Muslims are to give us power and sex appeal, and historical materialists are to give them what we know, knowledge being as theoretically sexy and powerful as faith. But nowadays, too many secular leftists, outside Latin America, are too philistine to be eligible.
On 10/17/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> why don't
> we project some more daydreams that-a-way: How about a
> wacky new Iranian fad where THE MEN WEAR HIJAB, BUT
> NOT THE WOMEN?
Hijab, which is not the same thing as a veil or a headscarf, is for both men and women. You never see devout Muslim men in short sleeves or short pants in Iran, though the ban on them has been now relaxed, or even here in the West, where they can wear what they want except at work.
As for the veil, Tuareg men, for instance, wear a face veil, called tagelmust, which Tuareg women do not wear: "Tagelmust," <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagelmust>; and "The Veil and Veiling," <http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/arthistory/ah369/finalveil.htm>. See, also, Karl -G. Prasse, Tuaregs: The Blue People, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1995, p. 26: <http://books.google.com/books?id=jeh3gxrpp1kC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=men+veil+tuareg&source=web&ots=hXxj1I2zfh&sig=dtt9pQP0TAbV-9YB29k7bq_ARaY>
On 10/17/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Also, about the Armenian genocide thread, I was
> expecting you to weigh in there. Aren't you an expert
> on that, too?
>
> All-Iran, all the time,
If Paris is worth a mass, Iran is worth a Muharram.
BTW, do you know that there live in Iran about 400,000 Armenians? On the 24th of April every year, they commemorate the Ottoman massacre of Armenians. One of the scholars whom I have cited often here, Ervand Abrahamian, is an Armenian born in Iran and raised in Britain. Abrahamian notes: "As a gesture of goodwill toward the Christians, the Islamic Republic issued a postage stamp bearing Jesus' silhouette and a Koranic verse in Armenian -- the first time Armenian had appeared on a stamp since the fall of the Armenian Republic in 1921" (Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic, Berkeley: University of California, 1993, <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006wp/>).
"Iranian Armenians Gather in Tehran to Commemorate the 24st April": <http://www.chnphotoagency.ir/gallery.php?lang=en&gallery_uid=418>
<http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0707105383200106.htm> Armenian president rejects sanctions against Iran Berlin, July 10, IRNA
Germany-Armenia-Iran
Armenian President Robert Kocharian on Tuesday expressed strong opposition to imposing sanctions against Iran, saying they would not help resolve the ongoing international diplomatic row over Iran's nuclear program.
"We are against sanctions because they will not only damage us. I don't believe that sanctions will offer a way for a solution. I have the impression that tightened sanctions will only further escalate and harden the situation. It's difficult to say where such dangerous negative dynamic will lead," Kocharian said in an interview with the online site of Der Spiegel news magazine.
The Armenian leader added that Iran would be ready to suffer for its nuclear cause, if 'it is put under pressure and if it feels it is being treated unfairly' by the West.
Kocharian hailed 'constructive relations' between Armenia and Iran.
"We have constructive relations with Iran as economic cooperation is developing. We have two neighbors, Azerbaijan and Turkey, with whom we already have a very tense relationship. Therefore we do not want to ruin it with another neighbor. Iran is a country with an old history and a deeply rooted statehood," the president said.
News sent: 20:01 Tuesday July 10, 2007 -- Yoshie