Tag: Iran

Deadly Dress Code

Iranian women are again out in the streets protesting the brutality of the regime.

We can only hope that their efforts will bear fruit — or, if we’re Elon Musk, we can also provide protesters with Internet service via Starlink satellite, now that the Iranian government has blocked the Internet in much of the country.

The immediate spark was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

On September 13, Mahsa was arrested by Iran’s morality police for incorrectly wearing the hijab, the traditional head covering mandatory for Iranian women since 1979. Some of her hair showed.

According to witnesses, the police beat Mahsa in the police van; the police deny it.

Within hours of being detained, Mahsa was hospitalized and in a coma. She soon died. The police not very plausibly claimed that she had a heart attack. All a terrible coincidence. The family says that Mahsa had no health problems before being detained.

The immoral morality police were obeying the country’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, who on August 15 decreed that the nation’s dress code be more strictly enforced.

The protests — in which women have been burning their hijabs, cutting their hair, and shouting “Death to the oppressor!” — are ongoing and nationwide, and have spread to other countries.

At least thirty protesters have been killed.

In the words of the New Yorker’s Robin Wright, Mahsa’s death “lit the fuse of long-smoldering dissent in Iran,” and its people have taken to the streets before.

Godspeed this time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Hijab, Iran, morality police, revolt, revolution, woman

international affairs

America Safe for Quagmires?

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 29, 2020
3 Comments on America Safe for Quagmires?

quagmire, war, foreign policy, Iraq, Iran,

It happened: “The measure asking all foreign troops to leave . . . passed.”

We are talking about Iraq . . . and the U.S. military.

So, not much else has happened.

After that parliamentary vote, Ron Paul explains, “when the Iraqi prime minister called up Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to request a timetable for a US withdrawal, Pompeo laughed in his face.”

I am with Dr. Paul on this one. The U.S. should take this opportunity to get out . . . “before more US troops die for nothing in Iraq.”

But is it for nothing?

Once upon a time, Americans were afraid of military “quagmires.” Now somehow we’ve come to accept permanent quagmire status in multiple theaters.

Could it be that when President George Herbert Walker Bush said, following the First Persian Gulf War, that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” he was speaking of its psy-op effect on the American electorate?

Pushing us into World War I, President Wilson claimed to be “making the world safe for democracy.” Perhaps Papa Bush made America safe for never-ending “regime-change wars.”

Before becoming vice president and then president, and going on to claim victory over “Vietnam Syndrome,” Bush headed the Central Intelligence Agency, the original regime modification professionals. And certainly endless, pointless foreign warfare has been the health of . . . the Deep State.

“The pressure for the U.S. to leave Iraq has been building within the country,” argues former Rep. Paul, “but the U.S. government and mainstream media is completely — and dangerously — ignoring this sentiment.”

Put American soldiers — not some secret or not-so-secret Deep State agenda — first. Bring them home.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Bye-Bye Iraq?

We may soon be at war with Iran. Wait, in this day and age of endless conflicts without so much as a decent declaration, are we not already at war with Iran?

Clearly, the drone-strike killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, described by The New York Times as “the architect of nearly every significant operation by Iranian intelligence and military forces over the past two decades,” was an act of war. The Trump Administration predicated the U.S. assault on previous Iranian acts of war — including involvement in the recent storming of parts of the sprawling 104-acre U.S. embassy in Baghdad and, moreover, deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

Iran vows revenge. I want to bring U.S. troops home from the Middle East. And so did President Obama and so does President Trump, no? But several thousand more U.S. soldiers are now headed to the region.

The world’s policemen.

But, then, miraculously, a possible way out. News reports announced that Iraq’s legislative body, the Council of Representatives, would take up a resolution on expelling U.S. troops — er, well, asking U.S. troops to leave.

Please, Iraqi legislators, please: don’t throw us in that briar patch!

The vote was held. The measure asking all foreign troops to leave . . . passed.

It is an understandable request, one that we can only presume the U.S. will respect . . . once the legislation is signed.

Oops! The prime minister has resigned; there’s no one to sign it.

Plus, the resolution is “non-binding.”

Training the Iraqi army has been difficult, but how proud our nation-builders must be to see Iraqi politicians show a professional understanding of political sleight-of-hand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly international affairs national politics & policies Popular

Remember . . . the Maine?

“President Trump warned Thursday that America ‘will not stand’ for Iran shooting down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz,” a Fox News report summarizes, “while at the same time leaving open the possibility that the attack was unintentional.”

This incident immediately follows the previous week’s apparent provocation, attacks on Japanese oil tankers in the same vicinity — also said by our government to have been caused by the Iranian military. Nearly everyone now regards these events as portending war,* which some see as a long time coming, since American relations with Iran have been antagonistic since the late 1970s, when Shia clerics raised a popular revolt to oust the American-installed thug, er, Shah.

While Mr. Trump was incredulous that the strike on the drone (opposite of a drone strike) could have been intentional, the rest of us can dare doubt even more: Can we really trust the “intelligence” that blames Iran’s military or paramilitary Revolutionary Guard for these puzzlingly dangerous provocations?

Not based on past performance.

The “intelligence” used to justify America’s several wars with Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, seems more disinformation than mere misinformation. And we now know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident enabling U.S. escalation into Vietnam was a lie.

We should even “remember the Maine!” — the questionable rationale for the Spanish-American War.

Lying to start wars is obviously not unheard-of in our history. Indeed, some insiders have itched for war so badly that they have plotted false flag ops against the American people.

The truth of what is happening now may not be known for years . . . by us . . . or even by President Trump.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* According to the New York Times, late yesterday President Trump authorized and then de-authorized a strike against Iran.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

The National Confessional

Secrecy in diplomacy and intelligence-gathering is supposed to protect the nation. But secrecy also protects bad policy . . . including great crimes that undermine our security.

This week, the National Security Archive released onto the Web the first official admission that agents of the United States government brought down — by assassination and violent coup — Iran’s democratically elected president, Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, 60 years ago:

The explicit reference to the CIA’s role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 . . . but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release.

The sunsetting of the secrecy provisions on the information finally provides sunlight, transparency, to this crucial moment in history.

Crucial, because it involved public American support for Masaddeq’s successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “the Shah of Iran.” The Shah became quite brutal in his embrace of “modernism” and (this is hard to write with a straight face) “Western values,” including the suppression of religious dissidents. This led to the fundamentalist Muslim backlash, with Mid-East Muslims widely interpreting American intervention and support for the Shah as both imperialistic and anti-Islamic, setting up the current “clash of civilizations” . . . in which neither side ends up looking good.

It’s interesting to note that much of the secrecy about the event not only covered up American crimes, but British ones.

America’s foreign policy seems so un-American. In so many ways.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags assassination, CIA, coup, Iran, Shah, TPAJAX

ideological culture national politics & policies

War and Broccoli

The art of polling is similar to almost any effort where interpretation is required: Context is important.

The Reason-Rupe pollsters seem to get this. Their recent survey covers not only a lot of ground (the president’s job performance, possible candidates in the upcoming elections, health care, morality and war) but goes into some depth on a number of the issues covered. For instance, each of Obama’s major challengers is put in the context of several competitive scenarios — Obama vs. Romney, Obama vs. Santorum (the poll was conducted before Santorum dropping out), Obama vs. Gingrich, Obama vs. Paul, etc.— with even possible third-party runs brought in. All very interesting.

The biggest section of the poll concerned health care. These questions also probed alternatives, eliciting opinions explicitly in the context of possible options and outcomes. But the results regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities were especially provocative. Nearly half of Americans tend to favor military action against the country were we to discover that the Iranian government was developing nuclear weaponry. But, when the conflict was considered as a long, dragged-out affair — of the same variety as happened in Iraq — support dwindled, and the numbers opposed to intervention went well over half.

Not shocking. Costs matter. Context matters.

The most amusing element of context in the poll emerged in one pair of questions regarding Obamacare. Is the federal requirement to carry medical insurance unconstitutional? Over 60 percent said yes. But switch that mandate to requiring Americans to buy broccoli and other healthy foods, and those crying “unconstitutional” shot up to 87 percent.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.