Canadian MPs willing to visit Iran

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:02:50

Iran's FM spokesman, Mohammad-Ali Hosseini

A number of Canadian MPs have expressed interest in visiting the Islamic Republic, Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hosseini says.

Iran and Canada have previously held parliamentary consultations, but a number of Canadian MPs have recently expressed their willingness to pay a visit to Iran to get acquainted with the regulations of Iran's Majlis and the process of legislation in the Islamic Republic, IRIB quoted Mohammad-Ali Hosseini as saying Tuesday.

The spokesman added that the issue is currently under study.

SF/GM/BGH

NOw this is interesting . the Iranians have thrown Canadian diplomats OUT for interfering in their internal politics - NOT because of the old hostage situation, as the Harper government likes to claim.

Also, I've said before - there is NO coming war with Iran.

Watch Syria instead.

And Afghanistan to boot.

Iran moves to join Shanghai Cooperation Organization

12:42 | 24/ 03/ 2008

DUSHANBE, March 24 (RIA Novosti) - Iran has lodged a bid to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that comprises Russia, China and four ex-Soviet Central Asian states, the country's foreign minister said on Monday.

The Islamic Republic, which currently holds an observer status in the regional security group, has long sought to become a full member of the SCO, seen as a counterbalance to U.S. and NATO influence in the region.

"Tajikistan supports us in this issue," Manouchehr Mottaki said after a meeting with the foreign ministers of SCO member Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which is another SCO observer along with India, Pakistan and Mongolia.

The bloc - which primarily addresses security issue but has recently moved to embrace energy projects - has indefinitely postponed accepting new members, but pledged closer cooperation with the observer states.

Speaking at the SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan in August 2007, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, "Everyone agreed that the moratorium should be preserved for some time yet," adding that the alliance "agreed to involve observer states more actively in practical projects."

Russia and China have been cautious to admit Iran, involved in a long-running dispute over its controversial nuclear program and alleged support for radical groups in Lebanon and other countries with the United States, Israel and major European countries.

Both China and Russia have, however, major commercial interests in Iran. The energy-hungry Asian nation wants Iranian oil and gas and to sell weapons and other goods to the Islamic Republic. Moscow also hopes to sell more weapons and nuclear energy technology to Tehran.

The Kremlin also needs Iran's endorsement for a multinational arrangement to exploit the Caspian Sea's energy resources.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20080324/102052243.html

Thought-Criminal: A look inside the rational mind of a man living in an irrational world.

Brainscanning babies Posted: 18 Feb 2008 02:05 PM CST Hey, what the hell are they doing to that kid? It looks faintly like the kind of machine that gives you infinite IQ but then releases the monsters of your id, but the neuroimagery-sensitive among you recognized the helmet as the business end of a magnetoencephalograph, or MEG scanner. read more

Report: Nonlethal Weapons Could Target Brain, Mimic Schizophrenia Posted: 18 Feb 2008 02:02 PM CST Of all the crazy, bizarre less-lethal weapons that have been proposed, the use of microwaves to target the human mind remains the most disturbing. The question has always been: is this anything more than urban myth? We may not have the final answer to this question, but a newly declassified Pentagon report, Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons , obtained by a private citizen under the Freedom of Information Act, provides some fascinating tidbits on a variety of exotic weapons ideas. read more

'Europeans Hide Behind the Unpopularity of President Bush' Posted: 18 Feb 2008 01:58 PM CST Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 84, has thrown his support behind John McCain. SPIEGEL spoke with Kissinger about Germany's Afghanistan mission, tepid European commitment to combatting Islamist extremism and whether direct talks with Iran should go ahead. read more

State Department drops ban on HIV-positive diplomats Posted: 18 Feb 2008 01:53 PM CST Under pressure from a lawsuit, the State Department is changing rules that had disqualified HIV-positive people from becoming U.S. diplomats. read more

More NAU Framework: CANADACOM Canadian Command To Assist U.S. In Emergencies Posted: 18 Feb 2008 01:46 PM CST The United States and Canada have inked an agreement to help one another during civil emergencies. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command based at Peterson Air Force Base, and Canadian Air Force Lt. Gen. Marc Dumais, Canada Command commander, signed the pact last week. read more

Iran eyeing rubles to free world of “dollar slavery” Posted: 18 Feb 2008 01:38 PM CST Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, may use the Russian ruble in trading on its new oil exchange, the country’s ambassador to Moscow said. read more

Get ready for a scary new world of life-enriching robot implants Posted: 18 Feb 2008 01:33 PM CST Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted. read more

Martin Kehr; Time for Kurdish Rights

Time for Kurdish Rights by Martin Zehr Page 1 of 1 page(s) http://www.opednews.com

Time for Kurdish Rights

A recent article in the Washington Post entitled “Time for Kurdish Realism” by Michael O’Hanlon and Omer Taspinar presents Kurdish autonomy and the inclusion of the Kirkuk Referendum in the Iraqi Constitution as some sort of sectarian move for power by the Kurdish nation and its peoples. The first sentence of the article presents its view that Kurds are merely a factional dispute among the Iraqis. The fact is that the Kurdish nation is the only one that defines its interests as a nation and not as a religious faction of Islam. Although the Kurds are predominately Sunni, they never identified with the political parties of the Baathists and they endured the brutality at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s regime. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War 1 Kurds were promised a referendum which the imperial occupiers in their own scheme for divide and conquer reneged on. Iraq as a nation with no cohesive national identity was preferable to the British than nations that were forged historically and presented a common culture and territory. So the nations of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran had boundaries established by the British that divided the Kurds in those newly created states and prevented them from their right to national sovereignty.

Since then the Kurds were subjected to numerous mass murder campaigns by the political leaders, such as Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein, of the states into which they were partitioned. Poison gas was used against them at Halabja and they were forced out of Kirkuk in an “Arabization” campaign by Hussein. The authors admit to this but presume that the reason for the delay in the Kirkuk referendum has been their demand for independence. The Kurdish Regional Government has worked with the central government in Baghdad with an understanding of their vulnerability as a people in the region and has exercised judgment in regards to how to protect its people and establish a workable political solution in the context of the current US occupation. They also confront the historical record of aggression on their people by the other states in the region and the record of attempts to forcibly assimilate them by Turkey resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds.

The writers of the article suggest just the opposite that: “the Kurds seem to believe that if Iraq fails, they will be okay.” In fact, just the opposite is the case that concerns them. They are really taking the measures they need to now to protect the people in the event of the dissolution of Iraq after the US occupation ends and proposing that any future with Iraq be based on the recognition of their autonomy. There is no record that anyone can present that establishes their safety will be assured by any of its neighbors or any new regime in Baghdad. There is no guarantee that a centralized regime will protect the Kurdish people. In fact, the record indicates that they are already considered hostile to Sunni and Shi’a political leadership not because of any military engagement against them by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Rather leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr have actively sought to deny the political rights of the Kurds within Iraq.

The attempt to make oil the primary focus denies the historical record of Kurdish peoples and attempts to present the Kurds as ungrateful to US occupiers in Iraq. The gratitude of Kurds for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein should not be confused with their necessity to establish their own armed forces for their own defense and the need to rectify the historical injustice of the denial of Kurdish national rights. The U.S. does not have the right, as an occupier, to prevent the political leadership of the KRG from acting in a manner guaranteed under the current Iraqi Constitution. The Kirkuk Referendum is embedded in that Constitution. They already accepted a six-month delay to it from the deadline established in the Iraqi Constitution. Imagine their unreasonableness! Even in the face of hundreds of thousands of Turkish troops massed on the border, they agree to a delay.

“Kurdish realism” is based not on a short-term US invasion but on the recognition that the future must be prepared for under the present circumstances. This means the Kurdish nation must be prepared to confront any and all eventualities. For the Kurdish nation making a mistake now will be paid for in the future in the lives of Kurdish peoples. If the government in Baghdad delays the referendum, then they are totally within their rights to work around it and work towards the development of resources within existing boundaries to provide economic security for their people. If the suggestion is they should be silent and submissive when the government in Iraq delays and stalls the implementation of the Kirkuk referendum that is simply a prescription for national disaster.

The Turkish government has still refused to recognize the Kurdistan Regional Government and has in the past invaded them. Turkey is not a disinterested party in regards to the territory of southern Kurdistan that it once occupied under the Ottoman Empire and has its own motives in seeking to expand beyond its current borders. Likewise, it has its own motives for attempting to present the PKK as it exists today as a threat. Within Turkey it has continued its persecution of Kurdish political parties, such as the Democratic Society Party (DTP). In the face of these assaults a non-violent march in Turkey against the planned Turkish invasion was sent off with 20,000 supporters demonstrating on February 6 in Diyarbakir. Is it unreasonable for Turkey to cease its attacks on sovereign territory or allow the political representatives within its own nation to represent their people without the threat of retaliation?

Who is being unreasonable here? Is it the Kurds who defend their political and national rights or the Turkish government and military that bombs Iraqi citizens and persecutes Kurds within its own nation? Who is being unrealistic here? Is it the Kurds who confront the power of the largest military states of Turkey and Iran in the region that have demonstrated a hostile intent towards Kurdish people or the KRG that acts to establish the needed economic, political and military infrastructure that can build for the future without the shadow of genocide looming over them?

Martin Zehr is an American political writer in the San Francisco area whose article on the Kirkuk Referendum has been printed by the Kurdish Regional Government,

http://www.moera-krg.org/articles/detail.asp?smap=01030000&lngnr=12&anr=12121&rnr=140 Another article was reprinted in its entirety by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/news070514.html He is a Contributing Writer to Kurdish Aspect www.kurdishaspect.com/AboutUs.html where his articles have appeared on line and in print. URL links to articles on OPEDNEWS.com can be found at: http://gregg-jocoy.blogspot.com/2007/04/mato-ska-builds-libraries-at.html

His articles have been posted widely http://www.countercurrents.org/zehr060607.htm http://rojtv.blogspot.com/2007/05/turkish-media-ramps-up-anti-kurdish.html http://greekturkish.18.forumer.com/a/nationbuilding-strategy-kurdistan_post1569.html http://asoxandan.com/Direje_E.asp?Babet=Raport&Jimare=123 http://www.balochpeople.org/eng/2007/mar/opinions2.htm http://www.kurdistantv.net/encamek.asp?ser=20&cep=1&nnimre=4643&gerbeje=Martin

The Guldimann Memorandum
The Iranian "roadmap" wasn't a roadmap and wasn't Iranian.
by Michael Rubin
10/22/2007, Volume 013, Issue 06

As relations between Washington and Tehran deteriorate, critics of the Bush administration are seeking to cast blame for the rocky relationship not on Iran's nuclear program or support of terrorism, but on President Bush's intransigence. At the root of the attacks is the administration's supposed rejection of a May 2003 Iranian offer of a grand bargain to settle all outstanding disputes. "Basking in the glory of 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq, the Bush administration dismissed the Iranian offer," Peter Galbraith, a Democratic party activist and former ambassador to Croatia, wrote in the October 11 New York Review of Books.

The problem is that this argument is rooted in a fraud. The "Iranian Roadmap," which was posted online by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on April 28, was not an Iranian overture but the work of a disgruntled Swiss diplomat, Tim Guldimann.

I first met Guldimann at a 1999 dinner party at his Tehran residence, and he spoke of his desire to repair U.S.-Iranian relations. The Swiss ambassador in Tehran is charged with representing U.S. interests--basically passing messages between the governments--but Guldimann was more ambitious. He saw an opportunity to facilitate rapprochement, which he said was hampered not by Iran's support for anti-U.S. terrorist groups and violent opposition to the Camp David II process, but by the Clinton administration's inflexibility.

Fast forward four years: Guldimann was nearing the end of his posting. With Iranian reform in retreat, he had little to show for his time--and blamed Bush and Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei equally.

Guldimann developed the one-page "roadmap" in conversation with Sadeq Kharrazi, the Iranian ambassador in Paris. It suggests Tehran would address Washington's concerns about its weapons programs, its embrace of terrorism, its efforts to destabilize Iraq, and its opposition to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In exchange, Washington would refrain from pressing regime change, abolish sanctions, recognize Iran's "legitimate security interests," crack down on the militant Mujahedin al-Khalq (MKO), and give the Islamic Republic access to "peaceful" nuclear, biological, and chemical technology.

Kharrazi circulated the paper to senior Iranian officials with the caveat that it did not come from Washington, and Guldimann tried to use the Iranian response as "the basis for opening bilateral discussion." The paper went nowhere; it was clear to all involved that it was Guldimann's proposal and had little to do with Tehran. Guldimann said in his cover memo and in meetings with a range of U.S. policymakers that the Iranian leadership agreed with 85 to 90 percent of the proposal, though he did not know which 10-15 percent they disputed.

Guldimann's suggestion that the proposal came from Iran was bizarre. The United States and Iran were already deep in dialogue, with British foreign secretary Jack Straw as the high-level intermediary. In 2003, Iran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammad Javad Zarif, met U.S. diplomats Zalmay Khalilzad and Ryan Crocker in Paris and Geneva. Indeed, Khalilzad met Zarif the day before Guldimann delivered his Iranian "breakthrough."

Guldimann's ignorance of these ongoing discussions exposed his fraud. John Bolton, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, suggested to Colin Powell that the Swiss be formally asked to recall Guldimann for freelancing. The Swiss foreign ministry keeps a discreet silence, but Guldimann has quietly left the foreign service.

The facts notwithstanding, a coterie of former officials and lobbyists have seized upon the Guldimann memo. Flynt Leverett, a Condoleezza Rice appointee who left the National Security Council to campaign for John Kerry in 2004, has compared it to Mao Zedong's 1972 opening of China. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, affirmed the Iranian offer to credulous journalists. Iran lobbyist Trita Parsi, a former aide to disgraced congressman Bob Ney, insists he alerted White House political strategist Karl Rove to the Iranian proposal. But Parsi, who trades on his close ties to the Tehran regime, was also unaware that the United States was already in talks with the Islamic Republic.

Journalists at the Financial Times and the Guardian used the Guldimann memo to bash Bush's alleged diplomatic ineptitude, the plotting of the neoconservatives, and the dark hands of Cheney and Rumsfeld. From there, it crossed the Atlantic. On April 29, 2007, Nicholas Kristof penned a column in the New York Times labeling the Bush administration's rejection of the Iranian offer "diplomacy at its worst":

A U.S.-Iranian rapprochement could have saved lives in Iraq, isolated Palestinian terrorists and encouraged civil society groups in Iran. But instead the U.S. hard-liners chose to hammer plowshares into swords.

In her new book, USA Today's Iran beat reporter Barbara Slavin suggests Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith are to blame for scuttling the offer.

Regardless of who wins the White House in 2008, Iran will dominate the diplomatic agenda of the next few years. But policy must be based on reality: There was no Iranian offer in May 2003, but rather a Hail Mary pass thrown by an activist ambassador and pitched by limelight-seeking former officials to a receptive press. Almost seven years into the Bush administration, Tehran has yet to offer a single confidence building measure. Relying on a foundation of falsehoods only distracts from efforts to resolve disputes before they escalate into military action.

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was an Iran country director at the Pentagon between September 2002 and April 2004.

So how did it go at the Iran summit? A synopsis

[SOCUNMOD] Iran's Summit Success
trumps the retrograd efforts of the 'lonely superpower'. -Cord
Caspian Summit a Triumph for Iran

by Kaveh L Afrasiabi Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ18Ak01.html

October 17, 2007

Few regional summits have drawn closer attention, by both the media and world governments, than this week's summit of leaders of Caspian littoral [of or on a shore, especially a seashore] states in Tehran. The two day summit, coinciding with twin nuclear crises and escalating US-Iran tensions relating to Iraq and the Middle East, is bound to be regarded as a milestone in regional cooperation, with serious ramifications for a broad array of issues transcending the
Caspian Sea region.

Billed as a "great leap toward progress" by Mehdi Safari, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister in charge of Iran's Caspian affairs, the summit has been a great success for Iran as well as Russia and the other participants (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and Tehran is likely to capitalize on it as a stepping stone for full membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), considered a security counterweight to NATO and US "hegemony". Indeed, it is as much shared interests as common worries and concerns, eg, the US's unbounded interventionist policies, that have now brought Iran and Russia closer together and to the verge of a new strategic relationship. After all, both Iran and Russia are today objects of American coercion, their national security interests and objectives imperiled by the US's post-9/11 militarism and its feudalistic ossification of the international order.

The upshot of the Caspian summit is, in fact, a prominent message about the need to democratize the international order by erecting effective barriers to the American "leviathan", as shown by specific agreements reached at the summit, including prohibiting other countries from using the littoral states for attacks on one another "under any circumstances'', and disallowing any ship not flying the national flag of a littoral state on Caspian waters.

How did this summit come about? The answer is, first and foremost, by astute diplomatic efforts on Iran's part and, equally, by a strategic evolution of Russia's foreign policy that is no longer self-handicapped by prioritizing tactical or conjunctural interests above strategic ones.

Having reached this level, Moscow is now poised to enter into a new strategic relationship with Iran that will serve the geostrategic, security, and other shared interests of both nations. "Iran is an important regional and global power," President Vladimir Putin said after his initial meeting with Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has been much vilified in the West and yet is respected in the Third World and beyond as an assertive leader of a developing nation standing up to world-domineering policies.

A major achievement for Iran's diplomacy and particularly for Amadinejad's embattled foreign policy team, the "good news" summit will likely serve as the hinge that opens new breathing space for Iran's diplomacy, and not just toward the Caspian, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Iran's Persian Gulf policy is also bound to benefit from the improved image of Iran in the Middle East, making more attractive Iran's role as a corridor to Central Asia which the Arab world in general and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states in particular can take advantage of in their external trade and energy policies.

Iran's summit diplomacy/ The most salient feature of Iran's summit diplomacy has been its multifaceted complexity, seeking to enhance regional cooperation
among the five Caspian littoral states by, for instance, initiating the idea of a Caspian regional organization to promote inter-region trade, and, simultaneously, pushing bilateral cooperation alongside multilateral cooperation. The net of bilateral and
multilateral agreements signed at this summit is quite extensive and a detailed examination belongs elsewhere.

Suffice to say, however, that from Iran's vantage point the summit has been a complete turnaround from the rather disastrous Caspian Sea summit of leaders in Ashghabat, Turkmenistan, in 2002, when Putin prioritized the issue of Caspian delimitation and division, a divisive issue. In comparison, at this summit, the thorny subject of Caspian ownership and "legal regime" was relegated to the background, with the attending leaders focusing on areas of shared interests, transboundry issues, and trade, hoping that in subsequent meetings the goodwill generated at this summit will carry over to those more divisive issues.

Various expert-level meetings of the Caspian states have so far failed to resolve the ownership question and, from Iran's vantage point, given the relatively minor energy interests at stake in Iran's sector of the Caspian Sea, it made more sense to draw the
right lesson from the Ashghabat failure and adopt a long-term view of things.

That approach by Iran has paid off handsomely, resulting in a sudden shift in the geostrategic climate in Iran's favor, in light of the joint communique of the other Caspian states regarding their refusal to allow their territory to be used for any militiary aggression against Iran, cemented by Putin's forceful statement against any such gambit.

Putin's other comment, regarding Russia's commitment to complete Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, represents yet another significant development for Iran, which has defied the UN Security Council's resolutions calling for a suspension of uranium
enrichment and reprocessing activities. By stating on record that there is no evidence to support the allegations of a nuclear weapon ambition on Iran's part, Putin looks to have provoked Washington's fury, as seen in Condoleezza Rice's instant counterpunch that Iran has been "lying" about its nuclear program. Yet more importantly Putin has signalled the beginning of the end of Rice-crafted "diplomatic consensus" vis-a-vis Iran.

As expected, the US government and mainstream media, unable to show any signs of adjustment to Russia's, and even China's, new line of thought toward Iran, have stepped up their Iran-bashing, with both the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal dedicating more of their opinion pages to the ritual anti-Iran commentaries.

Surely, the Tehran summit and its results represent a serious setback for Washington's Iran diplomacy, but they also show the defects of its Russia diplomacy and the fact that Moscow and Washington have reached a dead end. Putin has held his ground against his Washington detractors, wooing various European leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel and snubbing the pro-US Nicolas Sarkozy, while working on a new model of Russia-EU relations that is not dominated by US prerogatives. There is undoubtedly an element of risk here and Putin's new Iran policy may backfire, particularly if he does not generate more Iranian cooperation on the nuclear issue.

Regarding the latter, Iran is apt to reciprocate Putin's gestures by accommodating itself to more IAEA demands, and next week's meeting of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, with the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is an important occasion for Iran to appease Putin and his foreign policy circle, some of whom are openly worried about a parallel corrosion of US-Russia relations because of the new Iran-Russia developments.

Yet this is not a "zero-sum game" and US policy makers can draw the right impression about Iran's good neighborly policies benefiting regional and global peace, presently deepened in part thanks to Russia's singular influence on Iran. That is highly unlikely, however, and the continuation of the one-dimensional coercive policy toward Iran, so deeply entrenched in Washington, is the more likely scenario, no matter how out of sync with the rest of the world community.

The "lonely superpower" that Samuel Huntington once wrote about now appears dangerously on the verge of losing its "coalition of the willing" against Iran, both inside and outside the United Nations. The only choice is either stubborn refusal to make the necessary policy adjustments toward Iran, along the lines of a non-threatening civil diplomacy, or to face what is certain to be a diplomatic defeat in the global arena.

Iran's soft-power diplomacy should be given much credit for both the summit's success and the related frustration of the US's coercive diplomacy.