News from Iran? Good? Bad? Who knows?

[KRonn]

Seems things are heating up again, or haven't really cooled all that much despite the government crackdown?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,528823,00.html

Iran Opposition Leader's Wife: Let Protesters Go

The wife of Iranian opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi called for the immediate release of detained protesters as her husband was to appear at a mass protest outside the country's parliament.

In her statement, which appeared on Mousavi's Web site, Zahra Rahnavard said it was her "duty" to continue "legal" protests and condemned the presence of armed guards in the streets, Reuters reported.

"I regret the arrest of many politicians and people and want their immediate release," Rahnavard said in the Web site statement, according to Reuters.

Click for photos from Iran.

Rahnavard has raised eyebrows in Tehran for campaigning alongside her husband in the conservative state, and emerged as an important asset in her husband's campaign.

Meanwhile, Iran's supreme leader said Wednesday that the government won't give in to pressures over the disputed presidential election, effectively closing the door to compromise with the opposition.

"I had insisted and will insist on implementing the law on the election issue ... Neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a meeting with lawmakers.

Mousavi claims that hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 presidential election through massive fraud. He has called for annulling the results and holding a new vote.

Iran also said it was considering downgrading ties with Britain, which it has accused of spying and fomenting days of unprecedented street protests over the vote.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was asked about the option of reducing diplomatic relations with London after a Cabinet meeting in Tehran.

"We are studying it," Mottaki said, according to state television.

Iran expelled two British diplomats Tuesday after bitterly accusing Britain of spying and fomenting days of unprecedented street protests over the vote.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[alfred russel]

I don't really see how a timetable for nuking Israel depends on the reformers' power within the Iranian system. Furthermore this assumes the overriding objective for Iranian possession of a nuclear weapon is do with with wiping Israel of the face of the map. This would ignore the chief objective of Iranian foreign policy since the British retreat east of Suez: becoming a regional power. The bitter lesson learnt by the current leadership in the 1980-88 war was that Iran has to rely on herself for security, and that she is weak. Nuclear weapons are one form of corrective for this. Other aspects of foreign policy, such as the Three Islands dispute with the UAE, are also aligned with this quest for power and security.

I don't think that the drive to get nuclear weapons is just to nuke Israel, or that there is a timetable to do so. It is a question of looking down the road: if the current regime only has left hardline support and even very moderate opposition such as Mousavi has supporters in the streets chanting "death to the dictator", that may not leave much room to comprimise on nuclear weapons.

At the same time, after nukes are acquired, if a very hardline/fundamentalist regime is being forced out to protestors like those in the streets, it may be pressed to launch both on the premise that if it is going down the zionists need to as well or that a major war against Israel may be the only way to rally support to the regime.

[Tonitrus]

Kinda amusing, is that cnn.com right now;

A 14-year-old girl screams above the body of a Kent State University student killed in 1970. A policeman aims his gun at a Vietcong prisoner's head in 1968. And in 1989, an unarmed man in Beijing stands defiantly in front of a column of tanks. This time, it's amateur cell phone video that is grabbing worldwide attention. It captures the death of a young woman named Neda, galvanizing protesters in Iran and shaping perceptions elsewhere.

Um, in all the events surrounding those images...didn't those who could be called the "villians" or "bad guys" in each situation, end up winning and enduring? 

[jimmy olsen]

14? Unless I'm thinking of a different photo, there's no way that girl was only 14.

[alfred russel]

At the football match - and there is no way Iran could cut coverage of that - six of the players including the captain were wearing green wristbands, they said this was religious not political (the joys of green) but weren't wearing them in the second half.  The crowd had signs saying 'death to the dictator' and so on.  The crowd also chanted 'compatriots we are with you to the end!'

The joys of green may be overrated--apparently 4 are getting a lifetime ban from the team.

[Tonitrus]

14? Unless I'm thinking of a different photo, there's no way that girl was only 14.

I wondered that myself, but the article uses the famous one....



...and is irrelevant to the point, anyway. 

[jimmy olsen]

At the football match - and there is no way Iran could cut coverage of that - six of the players including the captain were wearing green wristbands, they said this was religious not political (the joys of green) but weren't wearing them in the second half.  The crowd had signs saying 'death to the dictator' and so on.  The crowd also chanted 'compatriots we are with you to the end!'

The joys of green may be overrated--apparently 4 are getting a lifetime ban from the team.

They were all old players near the end of their careers IIRC who wore the green, they knew this could happen and wore it rather than the young players to safe guard against the possibility.

[alfred russel]

At the football match - and there is no way Iran could cut coverage of that - six of the players including the captain were wearing green wristbands, they said this was religious not political (the joys of green) but weren't wearing them in the second half.  The crowd had signs saying 'death to the dictator' and so on.  The crowd also chanted 'compatriots we are with you to the end!'

The joys of green may be overrated--apparently 4 are getting a lifetime ban from the team.

They were all old players near the end of their careers IIRC who wore the green, they knew this could happen and wore it rather than the young players to safe guard against the possibility.

One of the players was 24.

[Kleves]

Um, in all the events surrounding those images...didn't those who could be called the "villians" or "bad guys" in each situation, end up winning and enduring? 

Nah; the hippy movement was pretty well crushed.

[jimmy olsen]

The Russian economy and industrial base was also expaning very rapidly in the period 1900-1914, so there's no particular reason to believe that that trend wouldn't have continued if the Revolution hadn't happened.

Except for the fact that the Czars had repeatedly proven unwilling to undertake any plan that would lead to even temporary social disruption.*

*Even the emancipation of the serfs was just trying to ward off the (late) revolutions of 1848.

Yeah, but that industrial growth from 1900-14 didn't have much to do with Czar did it? Why can't it continue to grow like that if he's left in power?

[alfred russel]

I see this as a postive development, btw. Losing to those guys in the World Cup a few years ago was like a replay of the Jimmy Carter helicopter meltdown.

[Savonarola]

The Russian economy and industrial base was also expaning very rapidly in the period 1900-1914, so there's no particular reason to believe that that trend wouldn't have continued if the Revolution hadn't happened.

IIRC the industrial base had shrunk considerably as an effect of wartime socialism; that was a major reason for adopting the semi-capitalistic New Economic Policy.

[Savonarola]

Yeah, but that industrial growth from 1900-14 didn't have much to do with Czar did it? Why can't it continue to grow like that if he's left in power?

Again going by memory here, but I believe that heavy industrial growth did not occur until the implementation of the five year plans in the Stalin era (of course there was a rather heavy human cost to that development.)  There's no reason to believe that the Russian economy wouldn't have continued to grow under the Czars as it did in the Lenin years, but the growth in heavy industry was due in large part to central planning and enforced collective farming.

[Queequeg]

Enforced collective farming did not result in one extra bushel of grain, limited mechanization and basic agricultural techniques imported from the west did.  Russian agriculture circa 1905 had not changed a whole lot in Great Rus' since the pre-Petrine period. 

[Savonarola]

Enforced collective farming did not result in one extra bushel of grain, limited mechanization and basic agricultural techniques imported from the west did.  Russian agriculture circa 1905 had not changed a whole lot in Great Rus' since the pre-Petrine period.

But they didn't have to feed as many people; so it was a net gain.   

Collectivized farming, as dictated by the five year plan, gave a greater rise to heavy industry for machinery production then had existed under the New Economic Policy or any previous plan.  That was the point that I was trying to make; not that it was a gain to agrarian production.