Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Tag Search

The escalating war of words over Iran's nuclear program, and possible sanctions against Iran, is pretty predictable. U.S. officials say Iran has left the world no choice but to impose new sanctions; Gen. James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, said on Sunday that current proposals are "not mild sanctions. These are very tough sanctions."

Tehran responded with a warning of sorts: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the West it will regret sanctioning Iran, and threatened a "response" against anyone "seek[ing] to create problems for Iran."

Update, 8:16 a.m. (from Gregg): Opposition Web sites are reporting (فارسی) a massive security presence in the streets: rows of riot police, some seven or eight deep, lining the streets along the route of the pro-government rally. Opposition groups are trying to organize rallies, but it sounds like (so far) they haven't been able to gather en masse. 

RAHANA, an Iranian activist site, is reporting dozens of arrests in Sadeghieh Square and other locations throughout Tehran. Sadeghieh Square is about one kilometer from Azadi Square, where the pro-government demonstrators assembled.

Over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole wants everyone to breathe deeply and think about whether Iran's latest nuclear announcement is really that threatening. Cole called "bizarre" remarks made on Sunday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who equated Iran and North Korea as both being "nuclear-armed" and "a real or a potential threat":

The US intelligence establishment continues to doubt that Iran has or wants a nuclear weapons program. Tehran does have a nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran allows United Nations inspections of it nuclear facilities. Although Iran is not as transparent as the UN International Atomic Energy Agency would like, there is no dispositive evidence of a weapons program. For the Secretary of State to frame Iran as she did is just muddled or dishonest.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking Sunday at a conference to showcase advancements in laser technology, ordered the head of his country's Atomic Energy Agency to find a way to enrich uranium to a more easily weaponized level.

The speech has made waves in the Western media, though the news is fairly light: Ahmadinejad told Ali Akbar Salehi, the atomic energy chief, to begin drawing up plans to produce more highly enriched uranium, not to actually do it. But as with all things Iran-related (e.g. last week's news about accelerating U.S. deployments in the Gulf) the slightest bit of change becomes magnified.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has some new polling data out from a survey of the Muslim world -- except it's not really new: These are the previously-unreleased results of a survey conducted in May and June of last year.

Remember that nine-month lag as you read the poll. It's great to have public opinion data on Hizballah and Hassan Nasrallah, but the polling in Lebanon ended on June 3 -- before the Lebanese election! So it doesn't account for March 14's victory, the months-long cabinet-making process that followed, Hizballah's new manifesto, the Syrian-Saudi reconciliation, etc.

And some of the poll's findings are just downright unbelievable. So let's take a look, shall we?

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the annual Munich Security Conference that a deal on shipping Iranian uranium out of the country to be enriched could be reached in the "not too distant future," according to the BBC.

"Under the present conditions that we have reached, I think that we are approaching a final agreement that can be accepted by all parties," he said.

American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brushed aside Mottaki's remarks, which were welcomed by China, saying: "The fact is we haven't really seen much in the way of response ... Sometimes we see a response from a part of the government that is then retracted from another part of the government."

How do Iranians actually feel about their government, the June 12 election, and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

We've lamented the lack of good polling data more than once on this blog. So I was intrigued by an event at the New America Foundation this afternoon, which presented a dozen pre- and post-election polls of Iranians -- most conducted by the University of Tehran. The polls aren't new (the most recent one was conducted in September), but it was the first time the data were collected in one place.

Western diplomats are apparently pushing ahead with new sanctions on Iran, despite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's offer to ship low-enriched uranium out of the country for several months.

US and European diplomats are pushing for an expanded travel ban on officials connected with Iran's nuclear program, and tougher restrictions on Iranian banks.

By now you've probably heard that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered to export Iran's low-enriched uranium for further enrichment.

In an interview with Iranian state television, Ahmadinejad said he has "no problem" with sending Iran's LEU out of the country. This is more-or-less the same deal the IAEA offered back in October, with one key difference: The original IAEA deal called for roughly a 12-month enrichment window, but Ahmadinejad said yesterday Iran would only part with its LEU for "four or five months."

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, expressed his support for the plan today after a meeting in Ankara with Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu. "[This is] a formula which could build confidence," Mottaki said.

The Iranian parliament finally approved a controversial subsidy reform bill, which would sharply slash subsidies on food, fuel and other staples.

The bill was approved after months of debate between legislators and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Much of the discussion focused on one question: what to do with the money saved through subsidy reform. Ahmadinejad wanted free rein to spend it as he saw fit; parliament wanted the savings rolled back into the Iranian budget.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing double-digit inflation and an ongoing debate over subsidy reform, has decided to focus his attention on... demanding reparations for the Allied invasion of Iran during World War II:

"You inflicted lots of damages to the Iranian nation, put your weight on the shoulders [of the Iranian people] and became victors in the World War II. You didn't even share the war profits with Iran... If I say today that we will take full compensation ... know that we will stand to the end and will take it."

Ahmadinejad said he may also demand reparations for damage caused during World War I.

Iran has a long memory -- that's why so many Iranians still talk about the CIA-engineered overthrow of democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 -- but I can't imagine Ahmadinejad will get too many people fired up about World War II. This is a diversion from Iran's current economic problems, and an ineffective one at that.

Late last month, Gregg interviewed three Iranian opposition activists who told him of an emerging crack in the nascent Green Movement between the group's mainstream and those who had become more radicalized by the Iranian government's brutal crackdown. The movement had entered a crucial stage and needed a defined leadership and philosophy, they told him.

Robin Wright, a Washington Post reporter-turned-think tanker, believes the movement has remedied that problem, she writes in an op-ed today.

The release of an opposition "manifesto" - actually three statements from separate groups - signals the coalescence of the movement's philosophy, Wright says.

I've seen some scattered stories in the past couple of days that the family of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is considering moving to Iraq in the face of renewed regime-sponsored violence against the opposition movement.

Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli Middle East analyst writing for Tehran Bureau, says that the Khomeini family was particularly troubled by the basij attack on former President Mohammad Khatami's Ashura Day speech, which occurred in the northern Tehran neighborhood of Jamaraan, formerly home to Khomeini himself.

Javedanfar cites a story posted on the Tehran-based Parsine news Web site (فارسي), which in translation (I don't speak Persian) says that Hojatoleslam Hassan Khomeini, the late Supreme Leader's grandson, has decided to leave with other family members for Najaf, though it's unclear if the move will be permanent.

It's New Year's Eve, and there aren't many big stories breaking out of the Middle East, so we're taking it easy today. But since everyone else seems to be writing lists of their most popular stories, we thought we'd do the same.

After the jump, our ten most popular posts of 2009, sorted by traffic. Not surprisingly, Iran was our most popular story of the year; five of our top 10 posts dealt with post-election protests or Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat down with ABC News' Diane Sawyer for an interview over the weekend.

Ahmadinejad grabbed headlines by denying reports that Iran is working on a neutron initiator, the trigger for a nuclear weapon. He claimed the reports -- based on an allegedly leaked Iranian document -- were fabrications ginned up by the American government.

BBC News reports that Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, one of the Iranian regime's most prominent opponents, has passed away in his home. They don't report any foul play. Although this might on its face appear to put a dent in the opposition's momentum, the BBC notes that protesters will use Montazeri's funeral as an occasion to stage demonstrations.

The BBC's Jon Leyne did a sit-down interview this week with Mehdi Karroubi. Unfortunately, most of the BBC's roughly 6-minute segment on the interview is devoted to Leyne's narration; we only hear from Karroubi a few times.

Nonetheless, Karroubi makes a few interesting points. He stands by his claims that Iranian security forces raped detainees in the days and weeks after the election.

Congress could move ahead with economic sanctions against Iran in a matter of weeks, with a final bill passing before the winter recess, according to recent reports.

That sanctions bill could include a gasoline embargo, a move that might be perceived by Iran as an act of war (and which at least one oil company CEO says is unworkable).

Iran has clearly spent the last week baiting the West to take exactly this step. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered his nuclear scientists to draft a plan for building ten new uranium enrichment facilities. Several lawmakers threatened to back out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Ali Larijani, the parliament speaker, said Iran would reconsider its diplomatic relations with the countries that supported last week's IAEA censure resolution -- which Ahmadinejad has dubbed illegal.

British authorities confirmed that five Britons whose racing yacht had strayed into Iranian waters had been released by that country, the New York Times reports. The five men were sailing their 60-foot yacht from Bahrain to Dubai for the start of a race when they suffered propeller problems, the AP reported.

Iran's treatment of the British sailors differs markedly from their approach to three American hikers who were arrested in July after apparently mistakenly walking into Iranian territory. The hikers have been imprisoned since then and currently face espionage charges, despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's assertion that "there is no evidence to support any charge whatsoever.

The Iranian regime's announcement that it plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants prompted a surprised reaction from the West. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner described it as "very dangerous"; Russian officials say they're "seriously concerned" with the announcement.

That was clearly the goal: As Julian Borger wrote this morning in The Guardian, Iran doesn't actually have the capacity to build those plants. The Christian Science Monitor quotes one expert who says the plan, announced yesterday by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will take decades. It will also be hugely expensive; Iran, already facing massive budget deficits, can ill afford to spend billions more on uranium enrichment.

So the regime's threat, for now, is an empty one, an act of political theater intended to provoke a reaction.