For anyone interested in following the unfolding events in Iran there is an op-ed piece in the 30 December New York Times, by columnist Roger Cohen, which is well worth reading. Cohen is well informed on Iranian matters, and follows them closely. He covered the June election from Tehran, after a previous visit in February, so has contemporary on-the-ground experience.
Cohen introduces his subject thus:
It has come to this: The Islamic Republic of Iran killing the sons and daughters of the revolution during Ashura, adding martyrdom to martyrdom at one of the holiest moments in the Shiite calendar.
Nothing could better symbolize Iran’s 30-year-old regime at the limit of its contradictions. A supreme leader imagined as the Prophet’s representative on earth — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s central revolutionary idea — now heads a militarized coterie bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people. A false theocracy confronts a society that has seen through it.
He gives the theocratic regime credit for some things it has done – things which themselves lie behind some of the contradictions the regime is wrestling with:
It has brought high levels of education to a broad swathe of Iranians, including the women it has repressed. In a Middle East of static authoritarianism, it has dabbled at times in liberalization and representative governance. It has never quite been able to extinguish from its conscience Khomeini’s rallying of the masses against the shah with calls for freedom.
...
Nowhere else today in the Middle East does anything resembling the people power of Iran’s Green movement exist. This is at once a tribute to the revolution and the death knell of an ossified post-revolutionary order.
He gives us some quotable quotes from the late Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri:
His anger came to a head after the June 12 election, hijacked by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Montazeri then declared: “Such election results were declared that no wise person in their right mind could believe, results that based on credible evidence and witnesses had been altered extensively.” He lambasted what he called “astonishing violence against defenseless men and women.”
Cohen argues that it is time for a change in the leadership model for Iran, and suggests that Iran cast its eyes westward to Iraq where the most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, exercises precisely the kind of moral authority and suasion — without direct executive authority — that Montazeri favored for Iran.
Without such a change, he argues, it is difficult to see the current unrest abating.
In Washington on Thursday a federal judge threw out the indictment of five former Blackwater security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 wounded. Read the 31 December New York Times article on this here, and a 3 October 2007 New York Times article on the shooting here.
Investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault near a crowded traffic circle at Nisour Square in Baghdad on 16 September 2007.
But in a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington wrote that in a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights” investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shootings. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.
Needless to say Blackwater, now operating under the new name Xe, is delighted. On Thursday, the president and chief executive officer of Xe, Joseph Yorio, said:
The company supports the judge’s decision to dismiss the charges. From the beginning, Xe has stood behind the hundreds of brave men who put themselves in harm’s way to protect American diplomats working in Baghdad and other combat zones in Iraq. Like the people they were protecting, our Xe professionals were working for a free, safe and democratic Iraq for the Iraqi people.
A phrase from the Vietnam era comes to mind:
It never happened, and anyway they deserved it.
One can hardly forebear to mention that the Blackwater/Xe “professionals” do not seem to have been working very hard for an Iraq in which Iraqis were particularly safe from them. Reckless disregard for public safety seems too mild a description and unfortunately these particular contractors were working under immunity from Iraqi law, so they cannot be prosecuted in Iraq. The one piece of good news is that the mass shooting eventually led Iraq to insist, during negotiations on a new status of forces agreement in 2008, on a provision that eliminated immunity from Iraqi law for American contractors.
Writing on his aviation security blog Schneier on Security (accessible here), cryptographer and security analyst Bruce Schneier comments on what he calls
the bizarre new TSA rules "magical thinking": if we somehow protect against the specific tactic of the previous terrorist, we make ourselves safe from the next terrorist.
He goes on to soliloquise (see 26 December post here):
I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.
There is a fascinating story from the early days of Australian aviation on Jim Belshaw’s New England, Australia blog. It concerns Leslie Hubert Holden (nephew of the founder of the Holden Motor Body Builders) and his DH 61 Giant Moth Canberra.
Jim was inspired by a photo of Canberra at Armidale aerodrome, probably between 1928 and 1931, sent to him by John Caling, a fellow pupil of both of us at the Armidale Demonstration School in the 1950s. John had the photo from his mother, who told him it was the first passenger aircraft to land in Armidale. He decided to find out what he could about this plane and its owner, and he has turned up quite a story, which may be read here.
Jim’s New England, Australia blog, accessible at http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com/, is a rich source of history, news, photographs and reminiscences about the New England region of New South Wales, the part of Australia that stretches from the Hunter Valley through to the Queensland border and incorporates the Hunter Valley, the Mid North Coast, the Northern Rivers, the New England Tablelands, the Northwest Slopes and the Western Plains.
He is the grandson of The Hon David Drummond, former Member for Armidale and New South Wales Minister for Education, who played such a vital role in the establishment of the New England University College (now the University of New England) in 1938 (see my Booloominbah for an account of this). Drummond subsequently became Member for New England in the Federal Parliament.
Jim’s father, also James (more familiarly known as Jimmy) Belshaw, was the first staff member to take up duty when the University College opened its doors in 1938. How fitting that he should marry Drummond’s daughter, the first librarian at the College, giving rise in due course to Jim (Jr.).
Naturally, being a Kiwi, Jim Senior became the rugby union coach, and rapidly made the acquaintance of my father, the first student to enrol. Item P1590 in the UNE photo archive, a photo of the 1940 university team, includes both of them.
Belshaw senior went on to become the University’s first Professor of Economics upon the University’s becoming an autonomous institution in 1954. I remember attending his inaugural lecture in the Teacher’s College Auditorium, in company with my parents.
In the countdown to the new year our media are full of retrospectives looking back at what happened in the year that is coming to a close (and in the case of some who think that the first decade of the twenty-first century came to an end last night, ten-year retrospectives).
This first day of the bright and shiny new year is perhaps a good time for those who are presumptuous enough to think that they know a few things to put their money where their mouth is and attempt some forecasts of what the year ahead will bring. Forecasting is a hazardous business, but here goes:
(1) There will be no progress towards an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Settlement building on the West Bank will resume, the slow ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem will continue, and Gaza will remain strangled by Israeli sanctions. There will be hand-wringing in Washington, but not much else.
(2) The “surge” in Iraq will by year’s end be a proven failure.
(3) It will be even clearer than it is now that there is no possibility of “victory” or “success” in Afghanistan, and the US Administration will be busy positioning Hamid Karzai and everyone around him to take the blame for the failure of what was a doomed enterprise from the start.
An old colleague of mine used to say that the opportunity of a lifetime had to be grasped within the lifetime of the opportunity. If the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 presented us with the opportunity of a lifetime to do something or other, the lifetime of the opportunity certainly did not last through eight years of neglect. If there was ever a chance, it is now far too late. The failure to establish any clear objective for the invasion did not help.
(4) There will be modest efforts to salvage something from the wreckage of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, but we can be sure that whatever action is agreed will be far too little, far too late. For a long-term hold, buy shares in engineering companies that are very good at sea walls.
(5) Spin doctors will find creative ways to present all of the above as success, or at least as meaningful progress. Modern governments never do anything that is unsuccessful.
(6) Pakistan will look more like Afghanistan than it does today. The US Administration will continue to pressure the Pakistanis to take actions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas which will prove disastrous sooner rather than later. There are good reasons why those areas were directly administered by Delhi during the Raj, and why the tailor made administrative regimes were continued from 1947 in the successor state, Pakistan.
At the outset of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 a lot of people would probably have agreed that if Afghanistan ended up looking a bit like Pakistan in 2001, that would be success. The net effect of our efforts will in fact be to make Pakistan look a lot more like Afghanistan.
(7) Nothwithstanding Pakistan’s travails, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence will continue to intervene unhelpfully in Afghanistan, with a view to Pakistan establishing itself as the dominant power in Central Asia. Much of the money to fund this will be diverted military assistance funding from the United States.
(8) There will be a very significant evolution of the Iranian political system. It is hard to see this happening without a lot of blood being shed, because neither side can afford to give up. In the next few months there will be increasingly heavy handed efforts to suppress the reform movement, but the reform movement has such momentum, and so many members of the urban classes are so sick of the current regime, that it is hard to see the current leadership being successful in reimposing order. There are grounds for cautious optimism, but don’t mortgage your house to bet on it.
(9) Whoever is running Iran will remain firmly committed to the development of an independent nuclear energy program, and in so doing will reduce the lead time for Iran to develop and deploy a nuclear weapons capability. Nevertheless, the Iranian regime will refrain from committing to a nuclear weapons capability.
(10) The United States will not succeed in establishing any sort of effective sanctions regime against Iran (for which we can all be thankful).
(11) As we emerge from the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, the full meaning of the crisis will become clearer, as we begin to appreciate the consequences for the United States and the United Kingdom in particular of the massive sovereign debt they have incurred. It will become evident that there can be no return to “normal”, that a new “normal”, meaning a substantial realignment of economic power and political influence, is in the process of being established.
(12) Some of the above predictions will turn out to be profoundly wrong (I just don’t know which ones).
That is a pretty bleak bunch of predictions, but that is the way it looks to me. Military adventures come at a cost.
The Victorian Government has finally performed a pseudo-launch of its dreadful “smart” public transport ticketing system. Pseudo-launch because, almost three years after it was scheduled to go into service on 1 March 2007, covering all transport modes, Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky has launched it for use on trains only.
The project is $350 million (70%) over its initial budget estimate of $500 million. Even at $500 million the project sounds very expensive to me as the cost of reinventing something that has been done before and better many times in major cities all over the world.
As a former Secretary to the Department of Defence I cannot help comparing this performance to the Collins Class submarine project, which has received such a bad press over the years that it is often cited as an example of cost overruns in major Defence projects. In fact, the total cost “overrun” (additional money that had to be spent to meet contractual requirements) was $143 million in a $5 billion project – not bad by any standard, certainly a lot better than a $350 million overrun on a project a tenth of the cost. And it would have to be said that developing a new generation submarine (rather like developing an underwater aeroplane) is more of a challenge than developing yet another public transport ticketing system.
On the subject of defence projects more generally, Defence Minister Senator Faulkner told the Australia and New Zealand School of Government on 13 August that 83% of the 200 defence projects closed out in the last decade were on or below budget, so Defence is not in fact the principal generator of failed public sector projects.
Another thing I cannot help noticing about myki, 45 years after first laying my hands to a computer, is that the developers (or writers of the specifications?) seem to have fallen for the classic error of computerising the old way of doing things rather than asking the fundamental question of how one would design the system from the bottom up given the capacity to access and process mountains of data in real time.
I refer in particular to the fact that the zone system (and the two-hour ticket system) seems to have been faithfully translated into this expensive white elephant. Given that the division of the city into zones is a proxy for pricing by distance in the absence of a satisfactory way of measuring distance, I would have hoped that after spending $850 million we could have a genuine user pays system in which people are charged by the kilometre on the basis of where we swipe our cards on and off. Rather, it seems that we will persist with a system in which I can travel seven stops to the city and ride around the city loop for two hours for a zone one ticket price, but if I want to make a single journey six stops in the opposite direction to pick up my car after a service, I have to pay a great deal more because I cross a zonal boundary. Why did we want to enshrine that idea in the new “smart” system? What is smart about that?
Minister Kosky says that we will all learn to love myki. I doubt it.
The Iranian regime is a regime in trouble. The leading opposition figures will not be silenced, and the young dissidents in the streets just will not go away.
The leading opposition figures are not marginal or opportunistic operators – they are key figures in the Islamic Revolution. Consider who they are:
Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died at his home in Qom on 19 December at the age of 87, was the architect of the novel constitutional principal of velayat-e faqih(guardianship of the jurisprudent)which was introduced by Ayatollah Khomeini. Although he was central to the establishment of the velayat-e faqih, Montazeri’s position was that clerics should play an advisory role rather than rule directly, a point on which he seems to have fallen out with Khomeini.
Montazeri was nominated to succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader, but became an increasingly controversial figure. He spoke out against the sudden execution of thousands of dissidents in 1988, and became an opponent of the export of the revolution. Of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie he said "People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people."
In 1997 he was placed under house arrest after calling for a sharp reduction in the powers of the Leader, saying that the occupant of this position should “supervise, not rule”, and that Khamene’i was not competent to issue religious rulings – telling commentary because Montazeri was so much more senior a cleric than Khamane’i, whose supporters were never able to get him elected to grand ayatollah level. He was released from house arrest in 1993.
He continued to be a thorn in the flesh of the regime right up to his death, speaking out about human rights including women’s rights, insisting that legitimacy flows from the people to the government and not the other way around, and always arguing from deep religious principles. After the June election he issued a statement that the Islamic republic is neither Islamic nor a republic.
In death he will probably be more of a problem for the regime than he was in life. Hundreds of thousands of mourners turned out for his funeral on 21 December, and the funeral became the occasion of both a mass protest against the regime and efforts on the part of Basiji militia to prevent reformist figures such as Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi from reaching Montazeri’s house .
Mir Hossein Moussavi, Prime Minister of Iran from 1981-89, a term which was almost completely coextensive with the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. He is well regarded for his management of Iran during that very difficult period.
Moussavi is the candidate from whom the June election was stolen. During the campaign he campaigned for a freer information environment, an end to discrimination against women, and for law enforcement agencies to be made responsible to the elected President rather than the unelected supreme leader. A reformist and member of the Islamic Left, he is nevertheless a rather conservative figure, and has been a member of the Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between the clerics and the legislature, since 1989.
Dr Mohammad Khatami, President of Iran from 1997-2005. Dr Khatami is one of Iran’s leading reformists. He had been a member of Mir Hossein Moussavi’s cabinet, and stood in 1997 when Moussavi declined to do so. He ran on a platform of liberalisation and reform, and won a landslide victory with 70 per cent of the vote. During his two terms as president, Khatami advocated freedom of expression, tolerance and civil society, constructive diplomatic relations with other states, and an economic policy that supported a free market and foreign investment.
Having completed two terms he was not eligible to stand again, and was succeeded by surprise victor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He indicated an intention to stand in the 2009 election, but in March when Moussavi announced his intention to run Dr Khatami withdrew in order not to split the reformist vote.
Mehdi Karroubi, Chairman of the National Trust Party, which he founded in 2005. He was speaker of the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) from 1989-92 and from 2000-04. He is a supporter of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to whom he was an adviser and who appointed him to the Expediency Discernment Council, but is a critic of the Guardian Council, the most influential body in the Iranian political system.
In his first term as speaker Karroubi identified himself with the radical faction which pursued populist policies and favoured state control of the economy. In 1989 he headed an association of radical clerics but he left that group to found the National Trust Party. He continues to favour a strong role for the state in the planning of the economy, but has been a strong advocate for the human rights of Iranian citizens, including improvements in the rights of women and the rights of religious and tribal minorities.
In August Karroubi claimed that some of his supporters had been tortured to death while being held in detention following large scale post-election protests. He also called for an investigation into allegations that both male and female detainees were sexually assaulted and raped in prison.
Karroubi is in many ways the regime’s most problematic critic. A conservative cleric, like Montazeri he argues from religious principles and accordingly challenges the regime on its home ground. He refuses to be silenced, and as he was jailed nine times by the Shah he is clearly a difficult man to intimidate.
Although the regime initially denied Karroubi’s charges, on 19 December CNN reported (here) that three Iranian prison officials had been charged with premeditated murder and nine others indicted on unspecified charges relating to the abuse of detainees.
As for the street demonstrations, they simply refuse to die, and every public occasion connected with a reformist or dissident figure, such as Ayatollah Montazeri’s funeral, simply becomes another occasion for public protest.
In recent days things have only gone from bad to worse. On 26 December Government forces shut down a speech by Mohammad Khatami. About 50 vigilantes armed with chains, batons and pepper spray disrupted a speech by Mr. Khatami at Jamaran Mosque in Tehran, the home mosque of Ayatollah Khomeini. The mosque sits next door to the house of Ayatollah Khomeini, many of whose relatives have sided with the opposition in this conflict. This year, for the first time, the government canceled the Shiite mourning ceremonies at Ayatollah Khomeini’s shrine, which were to have taken place in conjunction with the holidays on Saturday and Sunday.
After a day of protests and violent crack-down, the regime has arrested former Foreign Minister Mohammad Yazdi and three close aides of Mir Hossein Moussavi. His nephew, Ali Moussavi, was assassinated, reportedly by five men who first ran him down and then jumped out of their car and shot him. His body subsequently disappeared from the hospital to which he had been taken, in an apparent attempt to prevent his funeral from becoming the occasion for yet another protest.
The violent crackdown on Ashura, the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, brought yet another attack on the regime from Mehdi Karroubi. Noting that even the Shah had honoured the holiday’s ban on violence, he said in a statement:
What has happened to this religious system that it orders the killing of innocent people during the holy day of Ashura?
On Saturday this gentle 72 years old cleric was attacked by plain clothes security men, and other attackers smashed the windscreen of his car.
The recent actions of the regime and its supporters do not appear to be the actions of a regime that is confident, smart, or in control of its own supporters. A regime that is reduced to spiriting bodies away is in deep trouble. All the more reason for Western countries to stand back and let events take their course.
