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Saïd Amir Arjomand is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies at Stony Brook University.  He is the founder and president of the Association for the study of Persianate Societies and the editor of the Journal of Persianate Studies. His new book, After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors, is a subtle portrait of contemporary Iran.  Taking a chronological and thematic approach, Arjomand traces the emergence and consolidation of the present system of collective rule by clerical councils and the peaceful transition to dual leadership by the ayatollah as the supreme guide and the subordinate president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  In the excerpt below Arjomand looks at Ahmadinejad’s nuclear policy.

Leader Khamenei’s promotion of the hardliners and their takeover of the Majles in 2004 and of the presidency in 2005 made the military-intelligence cartel dominant in foreign policy, setting the stage for a return to an aggressive foreign policy.  The United States’ invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in the destruction of Iran’s strongest regional enemies, created unparalleled opportunities for Iran to expand its regional power.  Exaggeration by revolutionary leaders of the foreign threat to strengthen their internal position is the typical pattern after revolutions.  In the case of Ahmadinejad, he did not have to try very hard.  The Bush policy of regime change gave Iran the incentive to push for nuclear development as a defense against the short-term regime change and the long-term U.S. nuclear threats.

In his first few months in office, Ahmadinejad launched an aggressive foreign policy in place of Khatami’s Dialogue of Civilizations.  He firmly rejected the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accepted by his two predecessors.  In October 2005, as we have seen, he affirmed: “As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” and in December he made his bid to capture the Arab street for IRI by declaring the Holocaust a myth fabricated for the creation of Israel.  The hardening of Iran’s opposition to Israel was fully in line with the Leader’s continued championship of the Palestinians to bolster his own bid to be the Leader of the world’s Muslims.

Ahmadinejad’s failed attempt to follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad in the “Year of the Prophet, “2006 to convert the world leaders was due to his idiosyncratic initiative and cannot be considered a hardliner policy.  Nor did it enjoy the support of the hardliners.  It was otherwise with his nuclear policy, however.  The hawks in the Bush administration, after advertising a series of “covert” CIA operations against the IRI, officially announced their doctrine of regime change in 2002, hinting at times at Iran as the next in line in the months between the “axis of evil” speech and the invasion of Iraq.  (The call for regime change in Iran was routinely repeated in 2003 after the Iraqi invasion as well.)  Then came President George W. Bush’s baseless linking of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in his open-ended war on terrorism, and the justification of the invasion of Iraq based on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.  It had at least one unnoted but disastrous consequence.  The Iranians, in a state of heightened alert for their nationa

David L. Bosco is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University.  A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a former Senior Editor at Foreign Policy and has been a political analyst and journalist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a deputy director of a joint United Nations – NATO project in Sarajevo.  His most recent book, Five To Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of The Modern World, tells the inside story of this remarkable diplomatic creation, illuminating the role of the Security Council in the postwar world, and making a compelling case for its enduring importance.  In the original post below, Bosco reflects on Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly today.

President Obama accomplished some important objectives in his speech to the UN General Assembly today. He emphasized how much has already changed under his administration, mentioning torture, Guantanamo, climate change, and Iraq in particular. But he also tried to to call the broader UN membership to task for what he called “reflexive anti-Americanism” and a tendency to always point at others when discussing international problems. As has often been the case internationally, the president is trying to both acknowledge American missteps but also convince the world to follow its lead.

Obama did some finger-pointing of his own. He identified Iran and North Korea as threats that might take the world down “a dangerous slope” of regional arms races and unchecked nuclear proliferation. He demanded that these countries face consequences if they continue to ignore the Security Council. But the language here was much more tempered than that used by President Bush in 2002 when he was trying to rally the world to confront Iraq. He did not even hint that the U.S. might work around the UN if that becomes necessary.

One notable absence in his speech: he did not mention reform of the Security Council, which has been a staple of other speeches at the General Assembly, particularly from developing world leaders. In general, the Obama administration has been quiet about the question of whether and how the Council should be expanded. It will be interesting to see whether he mentions the subject tomorrow, when he chairs a Council meeting on nonproliferation.

Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.  His new book, Guardians of the Revoltion: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs, he traces the course of Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution.  In the excerpt below we learn about the relationship between Iran and Syria.

Among the most enduring yet anomalous alliances in the Middle East is the Syrian-Iranian relationship.  On the surface it may seem improbable for a Shiite regime determined to redeem the region for the forces of religious virtue and a secular state devoted to pan-Arabism to come together.  Yet a series of shared antagonisms led both sides to overlook the incongruity of their alliance and collaborate on a range of critical issues…In the end, a strategically opportunistic Hafiz al-Asad would find the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini an uneasy partner.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution came at an opportune time for the Syrian regime…  The Camp David Accords had led Egypt’s defection from the struggle against Israel and left Syria to face a strengthened Jewish state on its periphery.  In Damascus the fear was that the Reagan administration was hoping to facilitate additional peace treaties…  In the meantime, the perennially bad relations between the two Ba’athist parties governing Syria and Iraq had only worsened amid charges of interference in each other’s internal politics.  Through its willingness to oppose Syria’s Israeli and Iraqi nemeses, Iran’s revolution altered the Middle East’s political configuration.  The Islamic Republic’s embrace of anti-Americanism as a core element of its foreign policy distanced Tehran not only from the United States but also from the conservative Arab states, which were wary of Syria.  In one fell swoop, the Middle East’s balance of power changed, leading Damascus to escape its insularity and become a more critical player in Arab politics.

For an Islamic Republic determined to both wage war against Iraq and pursue a harsher policy toward Israel, the alliance with Syria proved particularly valuable.  The Asad regime’s willingness to supply arms to Tehran came at a time when the American-led embargo was depleting Iran’s arsenal.  Moreover, an alignment with an Arab state fractured the wall of Arab solidarity and diminished Saddam’s ability to portray his war as a contest between Arabs and Persians.  The alliance also offered Iran a reach beyond its borders, as Tehran suddenly had access to Lebanon and could more vigorously pursue its anti-Israel campaign.  In perverse manner, in order for Iran to wage its Islamist crusade against Israel and displace Saddam’s regime, it had to forge a relationship with a state whose internal composition must have been anathema to the mullahs.

The ensuing association with Syria reflected the Islamic Republic’s propensity to prioritize its ideological antagonisms.  The contradictions between an Islamist regime predicating its policy on pristine religious values and a secular, Ba’athist state became starkly evident during the 1982 rebellion in the city of Hamah, when Asad viciously decimated his fundamentalist opposition…Iran’s response to the massacre was to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood “as a gang carrying out the Camp David conspiracy against Syria.”  A theocratic state ostensibly devoted to propagating its divine message not only stood by as fellow fundamentalists were annihilated but offered words of support to the offending regime as well.  …this was a question of priority.   Waging war again Iraq and weakening Israel ranked higher than the fate of Syria’s beleaguered Islamists.

The strategic tensions underlying the Syria-Iran alliance became evident in Iraq.  For Iran, the alliance proved nothing but beneficial.  Beyond gaining an important source of weaponry, Syria’s closure of Iraq’s oil pipeline, which traversed its territory, inflicted an economic penalty on Baghdad.  The support of a major Arab nationalist state allowed some of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms to hedge and not sever their ties to Tehran…It is arguable that, without the Arab cover provided by Damascus, these sheikdoms could not have disregarded the nearly uniform Arab consensus for isolation of Tehran.  As Rafsanjani recalled with gratitude, Asad did not disassociate “himself from a country that advocated Islam because this country is not an Arab country.”

As the war dragged on, the Syrian regime found it had to reconsider its approach to its problematic ally.  In Damascus, the initial justification for supporting Iran was that Saddam’s invasion had diverted the resources of an important Arab country from the main struggle against Israel.  Thus, Baghdad’s opportunistic designs were actually damaging the Arabs and constituted yet another defection from the main anti-Israeli cause.  Saddam’s invasion was even more egregious give that the state he targeted was willing to devote its national power to battling Israel.  It was Saddam who had destroyed the “eastern front” and prevented both Iran and Iraq from concentrating their resources on Jerusalem.  Beyond such assertions, Syria sought to further rationalize its alliance by suggesting that its close ties to the Islamic Republic gave it sufficient credibility to mediate the conflict and even impose restraint on the theocracy.

Syria’s claims became more difficult to justify as Iran appeared dogmatic in its pursuit of the war and seemed prone to expand the conflict into the Persian Gulf.  As a champion of Arab nationalism, Damascus could ill afford a prolonged alliance with a country that disregarded Arab sensibilities and was determined to dispatch its armies into Iraq and disrupt the Gulf commerce…Moreover, Asad’s reliance on aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait meant that he could not always ignore the estrangement of the oil-rich sheikdoms…The tensions between supporting Iran and sustaining a place in the Arab system led Damascus to oppose certain Iranian measures.  After 1982, when Iran successfully evicted Iraq from its territory and took the offensive, Syria disapproved of extending the war to the Gulf states and went so far as to promise to support Kuwait against Iranian aggression.  By the mid-1980s, Syria had come to oppose Iran’s appropriation of Arab lands, a policy that was articulated in a variety of Arab summits and emphasized to Iranian emissaries.  Had the war continued beyond 1988 or had Iran triumphed in the conflict, Asad might have been forced to make some fundamental choices and reassess his ties to the Islamic Republic…

…Nonetheless, the fact that the alliance has persisted for so long should not surprise us.  Indeed, it reflects the Middle East’s basic inability to resolve its conflicts, the continuance of which often serves Iran’s larger strategic ends…

I've always been a fan of technology and its potential to help people learn and collaborate.  I've been thinking for a while about social networking and education, and how it's probably not such a great idea for schools to simply block sites like Facebook & Twitter and pretend they don't exist, rather than teaching kids how to use them responsibly.  I'm hoping to do some collective tweeting with my classes in the fall as a way to model effective, responsible use of social media.  I've been on Twitter as @KateMessner for a while, but I've set up a special account, @TweetK12, to talk with other educators interested in the concept of using Twitter in the classroom.  Feel free to follow & join in that conversation if you'd like.  I'm working on a proposal to present to our district technology coordinator for approval right now.

This past week, I've also been lamenting the fact that our regular classes are over -- and that I didn't have the opportunity to talk with my students about the way the world is changing right before their eyes...on Twitter.

Even if you aren't on Twitter, you've probably heard the news reports of how protesters in Iran are using it to overcome government censors, to organize and share news and images of the demonstrations with one another and with the world.  If I were still teaching this week, we'd be talking about the history of uprising, thinking back to Thomas Paine and our reading of Laurie Halse Anderson's CHAINS and how Isabel had to hide her illicit copy of Common Sense.  We'd talk about the efforts that those in power have always made to control the flow of information.  Totalitarian regimes, in particular, use isolation as a weapon against their people. 


Only now it's not working.  Iranian protesters are using 21st century communication tools to circumvent government filters, and people around the world are using those same tools to help them - changing the time zones in their profiles to Tehran to help shield those tweeting from Iran, even showing support by tinting their avatars green, the color that's come to symbolize the Iranian opposition.



John Green talks about all this much more eloquently today at his blog, Sparks Fly Up, summing up with this:

Twitter is not about what you had for breakfast, or Khloe Kardashian, or me. It's about evening the playing field.

Exactly.  How the story of #iranelection will end is anyone's guess, but I believe the world is a different place than it was just a week ago. A place that's a little less safe for governments that deny human rights, and a place where people living under those governments feel a little less alone.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the election in Iran. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Let me be the first to admit that I don’t know if the recent Iranian “election” was fraudulent, but the faith some pundits have placed on the “evidence” for their conviction that it was gives me pause.

The elections certainly weren’t free and fair, not least because the regime had hand-picked the slate of candidates, but we are unlikely to ever know that straight-up fraud was involved or if voting irregularities were of a higher frequency than those we have routinely taken for granted even in this country. Our failure to contemplate even the possibility that many a dictator has been democratically elected is a dangerous democratic hubris that has shaped and sometimes thwarted our foreign policy.

I am not asserting that the Iranian election was definitely legitimate, only that it is at least remotely possible that it was. At least two independent pollsters agree, and have offered the illuminating factoid from their poll that the only demographic group that found Hossein Mousavi leading Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were graduates and those with high-incomes. (That is to say, they are people most likely to resemble western spectators still staring at the final vote tally in disbelief.) Yet Christopher Hitchens would have none of it and Steve Clemons has decided that there will be blood. But is the blood that Clemons not implausibly predicts will ensue the result of the subversion of democracy in the Iranian electoral process or its success?

Shutting down the media may be egregiously non-democratic, but it is different than creating ballots out of thin air. The reason why this distinction matters is that we must learn to contemplate why millions of people around the world would want to rally behind fanatical leaders who hold such spectacularly repugnant positions as denying the holocaust. This has happened so many times before that it makes our failure to accept its possibility even more revealing of the depth and scope of our mind-block: consider the cases of Gamal Nasser (Egypt), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana), Slobodan Milošević (Serbia), and now, possibly, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Democracy is messy, and it is not naturally or dialectically inclined towards human rights, western liberal ideals, or the best candidate according to our standards. Neo-conservatives in America positing that the Iraqi people would welcome our troops as liberators back in 2003 have had to learn the hard way the costs of believing what they wanted to believe. In an analagous way, today’s pundits have been so quick to assert that the Iranian people in their post-election riots have exposed the charade of their recent “elections,” but maybe it is democracy itself that has outwitted the pundits. To understand the unpredictable and poigant path of democracy and democratization in the world, those of us who believe in democracy must urgently and honestly contemplate the number of times we have been hoisted by our own petard.

Physicist turned science writer, Gordon Fraser, most recent book Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam - The First Muslim Nobel Scientist, is a biography of Salam who despite wining the Nobel Prize was excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Undermined by his excommunication, these valiant efforts were doomed. In the article below Fraser looks at the history of Muslim winners of the Nobel Prize.

Amid all the international reaction to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has stirred up more controversy in Iran. In December the Iranian authorities closed the Tehran office of Ms Ebadi’s Human Rights Defenders Centre, saying it had operated for eight years without permission. Whatever the context, the perception of a Nobel Prize in Islamic countries often appears to clash with the traditional veneration in which it is held elsewhere.

The Iranian lawyer’s Nobel acknowledged ‘her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children.’ While people around the world applauded this recognition, others maintained that it was an insult to and part of a continuing conspiracy against Islam. In a statement carried by the Iranian Jomhuri Eslami newspaper, a group from a major seminary said ‘The decision by the Western oppressive societies to award the prize to Ebadi was done in order to ridicule Islam.’ How can what is supposed to be one of the world’s highest honours also be perceived as insult and ridicule?

Shirin Ebadi is one of the few Muslims to have been honoured by the Nobel authorities. The first was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who shared the Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 for their unexpected Middle East peace overture. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian hard-liners who condemned his rapprochement with Israel. So much for Nobel honor.

One year after Sadat’s award, in 1979 the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam (1926-1996) became the first Muslim to win a Nobel Science Prize, and the first Pakistani to win any Nobel. The achievement was greeted in the West with the customary apotheosis. But the accolade in Salam’s home country was very different. Salam belonged to the fringe Ahmadi sect of Islam, which was formally excommunicated in 1977 for its belief in a 19th-century promised messiah. Salam, once the Pakistan President’s chief scientific adviser, was ostracized. Revivalist Muslim voices criticized his Nobel award as a desperate attempt to restore Ahmadi credibility. In a grotesque eructation of prejudice and hate, the award was scorned as a deliberate insult to Islam.

After his funeral in 1996, Salam’s tombstone in Rabwah, Pakistan was inscribed ‘Abdus Salam, the First Muslim Nobel Laureate’ (innocently ignoring Sadat’s 1978 award). Soon the grave was visited by contemptuous outsiders and the inscription edited - and the error magnified - by an imperious hammer and chisel to read ‘Abdus Salam, the First … Nobel Laureate’. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, and the now absurd epitaph was daubed with black paint.

After Salam’s award, the 1988 Nobel Literature Prize went to the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), whose initial literary success in the 1960s and 70s created a new hub of Arabic culture. This became overshadowed by his controversial Awlad Haratina (Children of the Alley) which was banned in much of the Arab world after reactionary Islamic scholars declared its portrayal of religious figures to be blasphemous. In the darkness of such bigotry, writers who can still write are deemed more dangerous than what they actually publish. In 1994 Mahfouz almost died after being knifed in the neck, and was left unable to work.

In 1994 Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shared the Peace Prize with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for their resolute but eventually futile efforts towards resolving the perennial Israel-Palestine conflict. Such a pairing of names which not that long before had been sworn enemies soon created a new conflict of its own, and in 1995 Rabin was assassinated in his own country, a macabre reflection of the Sadat episode.

(On a less controversial note, in 1999, the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail was awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize for his work in using laser beams to track chemical reactions, ‘freeze-framing’ their evolution. 2005, Mohamad ElBaradei, the Egyptian Director General of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), and the IAEA itself received the Peace Prize for their efforts in preventing nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and for promoting its safe use for peaceful aims. In 2006, Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh received the Peace Prize for his idea of ‘micro-credits’ – mini-loans to help disadvantaged people haul themselves out of poverty.)

The world’s 800 million Muslims make up about ten per cent of the world’s population, but have garnered just a handful of Nobel awards, many of them generating more controversy than honour. Jews make up a small fraction of one per cent of the world’s population, but have won hundreds of Nobel prizes. This track record alone is enough to convince ultraconservative Muslims that the Nobel dice are loaded. But why such disparity and dissent?

The West has grown to view the Orient from afar through a thick prism which distorts the transmitted image. For more than a thousand years, the membrane between Islam and the West, inflamed by lack of understanding, has been rubbed raw by mutual hypersensitivity, and the ulcerated wound periodically erupts. It appears to be especially sensitive to Nobel Prizes.

Although the Tiger’s Choice, the PaperTigers’ online reading group, selects books that are written for children but can be enjoyed by adults as well, National Reading Group Month has brought to mind those books written for adults that younger readers might adopt as their own favorites, and that could launch impassioned discussions between parents and children, teachers and students, or older and younger siblings.

The books on this week’s list are books recommended for teenagers, with content that may be beyond the emotional grasp of pre-adolescents. All of them are available in paperback and in libraries.

1) Ricochet River by Robin Cody (Stuck in a small Oregon town, two teenagers find their world becomes larger and more complex when they become friends with Jesse, a Native American high school sports star.)

2) The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle (Alice is twelve, growing up on a modern-day Wyoming ranch with a mother who rarely leaves her bed, a father who is haunted by the memory of Alice’s rebellious and gifted older sister who ran off with a rodeo rider, and an overly active imagination.)

3) Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod by Gary Paulsen (The author of Hatchet tells the true story of how he raced a team of huskies across more than 1000 miles of Arctic Alaska in what Alaskans call The Last Great Race.)

4) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (This autobiography of a young girl growing up in revolutionary Iran and told in the form of a graphic novel is rich, original, and unforgettable.)

5) From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe (An amazing odyssey of a boy from the jungles of Burma who became a political exile and a Cambridge scholar, this Kiriyama Prize winner is a novelistic account of a life filled with adventures and extraordinary accomplishments.)

6) In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (The Mirabal sisters were beautiful, gifted, and valiant women who were murdered by the Dominican Republic government that they were committed to overthrow. Their true story is given gripping and moving life by their compatriot, Julia Alvarez.)

As the weather becomes colder and the days grow shorter, find your favorite teenager, choose a book, and plunge into the grand adventure of reading and sharing!