A must-read Iranian primer

[BobcatJH]

As the administration appears to be headed on a direct path toward war with Iran, it's important to familiarize yourself with our Adversary of the Month. To do so, look no further than this wonderful primer, put together by student of Iranian and Central Asian culture Karl Schmidt, who knows what he's talking about (and, quite likely, knows more about Iran than the president does):

• Iranians are not Arabs. Arabs, properly speaking, originate from the Arabian Peninsula and speak a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Amharic. Iranians arrived in present-day Iran from the Central Asian steppe and speak an Indo-European language related to English.
• Not all Iranians are "Iranian". There are a number of minority groups inside of Iran that, while speakers of Iranian languages, are not "Iranian" in the sense that they belong to the dominant nationality. Kurds would be one example. There are also a number of Turkic groups in Iran such as Azeris and Khalaj.
• Most Iranians are Shiite Muslims. This is due primarily to the efforts of Shah Isma'il Safavi in the sixteenth century. There are however other religious groups in Iran, the most notable of which are the Baha'is, whose religion is officially proscribed as it is regarded as a heresy of Shiism, and Zoroastrianism, the religion of all Iran before the Arab Conquest, practiced today by a small minority inside Iran and a diaspora community in India called "Parsis"; Freddie Mercury was a Zoroastrian, but your Queen records will not help you here.
• Iranians generally dislike Arabs. The Arab Conquest, which brought Islam to Iran, has historically been regarded with some ambiguity. On the one hand, the Shiite clergy has a clear amount of power in Iran, and most Iranians are sincere Shiites. Despite this, the Arab Conquest is also regarded as having destroyed the great Sassanian Empire, in its day a world power in competition with Rome. The villain of an early part of the Shahnameh, the Iranian national epic (think Beowulf but longer), was an Arab chieftain with snakes growing out of his shoulders. Since the sixteenth century Shiite-Sunni antipathy has also played into this.
• Iraq was historically a part of the Iranian empire. Mesopotamia was first conquered by the Persians in 537 BC. Since then it's been lost and regained quite a few times. This is one of the historical factors explaining the presence of the large Iraqi Shiite community.
• Iranians are fairly nationalistic. The nationalisms of Arab states tend to be rather weak because of their essentially being cobbled together randomly around British, Ottoman, and Roman colonial boundaries with the major exception of Egypt which has had a unitary history and culture for the most part since the fourth millennium BC; the major brand of ethnic nationalism in the Arab region is, or was, Pan-Arabism. Iran, like Egypt, has millennia of imperial history to point to, and its national borders are largely contiguous with the geographic settlement area of ethnic Iranians, even fairly loosely defined. It has not spent its entire history in such a unitary form, and one other national state, Tajikistan, uses what is essentially a dialect of Farsi, the Iranian national language, as its own. Much more so than a citizen of an Arab state, who may be for example Iraqi but not consider his or her Iraqi identity to have primacy over his or her Arab or sectarian Muslim identity, Iranians consider themselves Iranians foremost.
• In 1988, knowing that most Iranians did not support the regime, various Iraq-backed Iranian groups entered Iran from Iraq with the intention of overthrowing the government. They failed, because they were backed by Iraq.
• Saddam Hussein used Western-supplied WMDs against Iran throughout the 1980s. Iraq deployed massive amounts of chemical and biological weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, much of it supplied by the US. Over 100,000 Iranians were killed by nerve and mustard gas deployed by the Iraqi army. This colors the Iranian view of American WMD policy.
• We overthrew their government once already. In 1953, the CIA, working on behalf of BP, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, which had voted to nationalize the Iranian oilfields. They replaced Iran's democracy with a dictatorship under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who proved to be one of history's nastiest bastards, and was overthrown himself in 1979.
• Most Iranians think Mahmud Ahmedinejad is full of shit. They consider him to be an embarrassing yokel with a big mouth who got elected due to electoral fuckery and scare tactics. Sound familiar? Despite this, remember the whole nationalism thing.
• It's sad that I should have to point this out, but considering how many people seem to think Uzbekistan is in Eastern Europe, I think I'd better. Iran is bounded on the west by Iraq and the east by Afghanistan. For perspective on what this means, imagine that the USSR has reformed, built up a military arsenal thousands of times larger and more effective than our own, and occupied Mexico and Canada.

[Kellanved]

1. Well, Iran isn't an Arab state

It's a Persian state.

[BobcatJH]

2. Updated

I've included the entire list ...

[handsignals4theblind]

3. the above statement shows ignorance

It maybe a predominately Persian state but it also has many minorities living in it's boundaries- Jews, arabs, turks, kurds etc

[BobcatJH]

4. This is why ...

... informing ourselves about things like this is all the more important.

[Kellanved]

5. Does it?

Wow. Thanks for that statement, it sure shows a lot of understanding about the region.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

12. Eugh.

My neurons are writhing in agony after reading that.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. Another minority group are the Sufis

which is the mystical sect of Islam. Recently Sufi teachers and their followers have been persecuted, and meeting centers destroyed. (see Muslim/Islam group for the thread) I have a Sufi brother from Persia (as he calls it) and he tells me that in his family at least, some of the Zoroastrian ways are still followed, especially in No Ruz, the Persian New Year.

[kineneb]

7. I knew these things already.

But then my step-father is from Iran, and I lived there for a year in the early 1970s. We still have family that lives there.

Almost all Persians celebrate No-rooz, the vernal equinox celebration which pre-dates the Persian empire and Zoroastrianism.

As to minority groups, beyond the identification with their own groups, they still see themselves as Persians, and are indeed quite nationalistic. Almost everyone is part of a tribe or super-family group (the zillion "counsins" we have...).

The western parts of Afghanistan were also part of the ancient Persian empire, and they still speak Farsi there.

Khodoffez
(good-by, in Farsi)
...oh, there is no standard for rendering Farsi words using Roman letters. Farsi is written using the Arabic alphabet, and reads right to left.

[Neil Lisst]

8. Unfortunately, Bush has going for him the average American ...

...for whom Iran is almost like Iraq because their names are similar, they're side by side, and they're Muslim - and since they're Muslim, they're Arabs, which means they hate Jews. The average American sees Iran as a country that has oil, Mullahs, and a crazy president who wants nuclear weapons and to use them against Israel, and probably America.

Half are already prepared to back bombing.

Unfortunately, it will be more than half support when bombing begins.

[ShortnFiery]

10. Not this time ... I don't think they can catapult the propaganda

due to the sheer FACT that Iraq has figuratively blown up in our faces. :(

[Douglas Carpenter]

9. thank you very much

if you will indulge me -- I will once again post below a link and some excepts from an excellent article by Juan Cole


Fishing for a Pretext in Iran

by Juan Cole; March 18, 2006

link: http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=9929

snip:"Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has given a fatwa or formal religious ruling against nuclear weapons, and President Ahmadinejad at his inauguration denounced such arms and committed Iran to remaining a nonnuclear weapons state.

In fact, the Iranian regime has gone further, calling for the Middle East to be a nuclear-weapons-free zone. On Feb. 26, Ahmadinejad said:
“We too demand that the Middle East be free of nuclear weapons; not only the Middle East, but the whole world should be free of nuclear weapons.”
Only Israel among the states of the Middle East has the bomb, and its stockpile provoked the arms race with Iraq that in some ways led to the U.S. invasion of 2003. The U.S. has also moved nukes into the Middle East at some points, either on bases in Turkey or on submarines.

Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect and monitor its nuclear energy research program, as required by the treaty. It raised profound suspicions, however, with its one infraction against the treaty--which was to conduct some secret civilian research that it should have reported and did not, and which was discovered by inspectors. Tehran denies having military labs aiming for a bomb, and in November of 2003 the IAEA formally announced that it could find no proof of such a weapons program."

snip:"it is often alleged that since Iran harbors the desire to “destroy” Israel, it must not be allowed to have the bomb. Ahmadinejad has gone blue in the face denouncing the immorality of any mass extermination of innocent civilians, but has been unable to get a hearing in the English-language press. Moreover, the presidency is a very weak post in Iran, and the president is not commander of the armed forces and has no control over nuclear policy. Ahmadinejad’s election is not relevant to the nuclear issue, and neither is the question of whether he is, as Liz Cheney is reported to have said, “a madman.” Iran has not behaved in a militarily aggressive way since its 1979 revolution, having invaded no other countries, unlike Iraq, Israel or the U.S. Washington has nevertheless succeeded in depicting Iran as a rogue state"

snip: "in November of 2003 the IAEA formally announced that it could find no proof of such a weapons program. The U.S. reaction was a blustery incredulity, which is not actually an argument or proof in its own right, however good U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is at bunching his eyebrows and glaring."

snip"Bush’s allegations about the Iranians providing improvised explosive devices to the Iraqi guerrilla insurgency are bizarre. The British military looked into charges of improvised explosive devices coming from Iran, and actually came out this past January and apologized to Tehran when no evidence pointed to Iranian government involvement. The guerrillas in Iraq are militant Sunnis who hate Shiites, and it is wholly implausible that the Iranian regime would supply bombs to the enemies of its Iraqi allies."

_______________

And be sure to watch/listen/or read transcript of Sy Hersh's interview on Democracy Now. He pretty much says that baring unforeseen events a major attack on Iran is almost certainly going to happen in the not too distant future:

link to listen/watch/or read transcript:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/12/1359254

snip: "Everybody I talk to, the hawks I talk to, the neoconservatives, the people who are very tough absolutely say there's no way the U.N. is going to work, and we're just going to have to assume it doesn’t in any way. Iran, by going along with the U.N., what they're really doing is rushing their nuclear program. And so, the skepticism -- there's no belief, faith here, ultimately, in this White House, in the extent of the talk, so you've got a parallel situation. The President could then say, ‘We've explored all options. We've done it.’ I could add, if you want to get even more scared, some of our closest allies in this process -- we deal with the Germans, the French and the Brits -- they're secretly very worried, not only what Bush wants to do, but they're also worried that -- for example, the British Foreign Officer, Jack Straw, is vehemently against any military action, of course also nuclear action, and so is the Foreign Office, as I said, but nobody knows what will happen if Bush calls Blair. Blair's the wild card in this. He and Bush both have this sense, this messianic sense, I believe, about what they've done and what's needed to be done in the Middle East. I think Bush is every bit as committed into this world of rapture, as is the president.”

[Douglas Carpenter]

11. kick because it is important

for those interested in how the Iranian government functions -- here is a neutral website - link:

http://www.parstimes.com/gov_iran.html

the previous president Mohammad Khatami was a reformer and relatively speaking-a liberal-who wanted to make a number of liberalising reforms but was blocked by hardliners. His powers to do that were greatly limited. When President Bush declared Iran part of the "Axis of evil" the reformers and relative liberals lost a great deal of their influence that had been growing.

Iran has a very complicated system that includes an elected parliament and a separate judiciary. Ultimately the most powerful figure is Chief of State - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He's the guy who delivered the fatwa against nuclear weapons. In the Shiite version of Islam his view counts more than anyone elses. A fatwa is a final religious judgement that is binding to all Shiites within the Imam's domain. Just as Ayatollah Sistani's word counts more than anyone else to most Shiites in Iraq.

Both the parliament and the president have limited powers.