A Neo-Wolf in Green’s Clothing

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elias sajjad
by elias sajjad
11-Jan-2010
 

Nothing has united the Iranian people more than the violence, evil and brutality used by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei in the past months. The regime has revealed its true face – there is not one thread of humanity in it. And despite the brutality of the crackdown,Ashura showed that the green movement is well and alive. There isn’t a metro ride from Mirrdamad to Shahr-e-Rey where the slogans of Moussavi wouldn’t be heard.

But the green movement’s enemies are not just the murderers around Ahmadinejad and the Sepah. The brutality of the regime has enabled the neo-cons to find a way out of the hall of shame and overtake the American media airwaves. They have found their moment to pretend to be defenders of the Iranian people, even though they only months ago joked about "bomb, bomb. bomb Iran."

Two of the favorite sons of the neo-con movement are Abbas Milani, of the conservative Hoover Institute (which also produced Condoleezza Rice) and Karim Sadjadpour, a protégé of Fuad Ajami, a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq.

By pretending to be supporters of the green movement, these neo-wolfs in green clothing have used the recent uprisings in Iran to plant the seeds of a confrontation between the US and Iran that will destroy the green movement and benefit hawks in Israel and the US.

Case in point is a House Foreign Relations Committee hearing in July in which both Milani and Sadjadpour came out in support of crippling sanctions on Iran. Sadjadpour, who argued in favor of convincing Saudi Arabia to dump oil prices to destroy Iran’s economy, even claimed that leaders of the Iranian opposition as well as the Iranian people support crippling sanctions – a statement refuted by both Moussavi and Karroubi. “This is not sanctions against a government,” Mr. Moussavi wrote in his 13th statement. “This would impose further pain on a nation that has already suffered a great deal by its schizophrenic rulers. We are against any kind of sanctions on people.”

It is clear by now that if there are any sanctions the greens would favor, it would be targeted sanctions - not the broad indiscriminate sanctions Sadjadopour and Milani called for. Even the hot-headed Makhmalbaf have come out against broad sanctions.  

Earlier in the summer, Sadjadpur spoke at a neo-con conference and told the audience - off the record - that the Iranian opposition is quietly seeking to coordinate sanctions with the US government. John Hanna, Dick Cheney's old Chief of Staff and one of the strongest proponents for bombing Iran, then quoted Sadjadpour in an LA Times oped called Cripple Iran to Save it. This was tremendously embarrassing for the Green movement - not because it was patently false,  but because it would only take minutes before the Iranian hardliners would take advantage of that quote to vindicate their accusations that the uprising is not home-grown. 

Sure enough, two days later Kayhan quoted Sadjadpour in a harsh column and hundreds more were arrested in Iran as a result. 

(To Sadjadpour’s defense, his statement may not have been malicious, since he has a long track record of misreading Iran. He famously stated on TV that the British sailors arrested by the IRGC two years ago were in international waters because the Iranians can’t be trusted. Turned out later that a British investigation confirmed that the Brits weren’t in Iraqi waters as the Brits had first claimed. How embarrassing for Sadjadpour who always sides with Britain, the US and Israel against the people of Iran.) 

To be frank, both Milani and Sadjadpour have had a few too many mistakes to be considered innocent. Their neo-con credentials are solid, but unlike other neo-cons, they travel easily between the Obama camp and the Cheney clique. Their true loyalty, however, lies with the latter.

Milani’s case is well known. Hamid Dabashi has exposed this neo-con and showed his intellectual journey from being a communist in the 1970’s to a warmongering neo-con in the 1990s. (Most neo-cons began as militant leftist before they turned into even more militant right-wingers).. 

Sadjadpour’s journey is more straight-forward. He started as a neo-con during the Iraq war with ultra-neo-con Fuad Ajami at Johns Hopkins University and has remained loyal to the movement ever since, even though he has been portraying himself as a progressive ever since Obama took over the White House.(Ajami famously refers to the Iraq war as the "foreigner's gift" to the Iraqis!)

In 2004, right after the invasion of Iraq, Sadjadpour wrote an article praising US intervention in Iran and calling for Bush to attack Iran. Sadjadpour brought up the example of American troops entering Iran after WWII, and how his father thought of the American soldiers as heroes from another world.

“The Americans' supply train would regularly pass through my father's ancestral village, Arak, then a scenic oasis of green gardens and fruit orchards. ‘Whenever we heard the train coming,’ my father once told me, ‘all the young boys in the village would run as fast as we could through the apple orchard to greet the passing Americans. They would smile and wave and throw us whatever gifts they happened to have - playing cards, chewing gum, Life Saver candies. For us they were like heroes from another world.”

Sadjadpour’s mentor, Ajami, had written and said similar things about Iraq – coining the idea that the greatest problem US soldiers would face in Iraq would be the amount of rice Iraqis would throw at the Americans as they welcomed the GIs..

The creation of a false narrative of the yearning of American liberation was critical to sell the war in Iraq, and Sadjadpour was on the forefront of the creation of that same false narrative for Iran.

Together with Milani, Sadjadpour toured neo-con clubs and helped brainstorm how to advance the neo-con agenda on Iran.

In June 2007, the two spoke at a neo-con brainstorming retreat in Bahamas organized by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The meeting was titled “Confronting The Iranian Threat: The Way Forward” and the attendance list was nothing short of who’s who in the Bush administration’s effort to bomb Iran: Ladan Archin, an assistant to Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Bernard Lewis, the neo-con intellectual who argued for splitting Iran into seven different countries, Uri Lubrani, from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Michael Makovsky, who authored the Bipartisan report calling for war with Iran, and Rob Sobhani, the disgraced Iranian-American Monarchist who rose as a star under Bush through his calls for confrontation with Iran.     

The green movement and its supporters should keep their guard up. Now more than ever, the message to US politicians must be clear and synchronized with the message of its leaders from the inside. Those seeking to usurp the movement for their own purposes should be exposed. Particularly those who seek to turn the Iranian people’s quest for freedom into a cause for war and indiscriminate destruction. 

Beware of neo-wolfs in green clothing.

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mannya2001

Elias Sajjad: fear not

by mannya2001 on

No matter how much neo cons jump up and down, they can't influence US foreign policy. Ultimately, the President will have to sign off on them.

the president is not someone that wakes up and signs anything passed by Congress and Senate.  So relax a bit.

For you info- this is the IQ level of US governemnt officials:

COngress:  pretty low IQ

Senate:      much higher IQ

President:  really depends who is in charge

The Senate traditionally is the smartest of all US legislative bodies.  And they really don't do things for public opinion because they are embedded and can't be removed.

There are several exceptions to the high IQ in Senate:

John McCain--yes that square jawed, ugly turd

Joe Lieberman:  backstabber to Al Gore

 


shahriar74

dishonest article

by shahriar74 on

i was curious about this but after 2 minutes on google you can see this article is filled with lies:

sajjadpour apparently never participated in the bahamas meeting: //www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=27

he has spoken against crippling sanctions:   //wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/10/15/hannah-iranians-will-privately-greet-us-as-liberators/

and consistently against military action: 

//www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/inde...

"Based on recent experience, there is good reason to believe that not only would Khamanei and Ahmadinejad not be cowed by this rhetoric but also they would actually welcome U.S. or Israel strikes as a way to unite squabbling political factions against a common threat and keep agitated Iranian citizens preoccupied with foreign quarrels."   

Abbas Milani is one of our great scholars who has always believed that the democracy movement in Iran never died, it was simply dormant.

This slanderous article was probably written by one of the IRI's many cyber thugs. 

 


Darius Kadivar

Hamid Dabashi and Flynt Leverett Eat Your Heart Out ;0)

by Darius Kadivar on

Flynt Leverett & Hamid Dabashi: Iranians do not want to overthrow the Islamic Republic:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJw7bGr6qvA

 


Darius Kadivar

Cheshmeh Doroughoo Koor ! ;0)

by Darius Kadivar on

Middle East expert Abbas Milani and USA Today reporter Barbara Slavin argue that U.S. "surgical strikes" are not a practical option for dealing with Iran's alleged nuclear program.
 

Should the U.S. Use "Surgical Strikes" on Iran?

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRtVqeQPPIY

Where do you see Milani claim that Iran should be bombed ?


benross

Earlier in the summer,

by benross on

Earlier in the summer, Sadjadpur spoke at a neo-con conference and told the audience - off the record - that the Iranian opposition is quietly seeking to coordinate sanctions with the US government

Some 'off the record' this is! Who did record it then?!

Rest assured I'm not green, I don't want to be green and I won't be green. So you can be safe from this wolf. 

But if US is going to sanction Iran, and is coming asking me what kind of sanction do you think is better, I would try to come-up with something that hurts the people the least and IRI the most. Also if I have the power to stop US from sanctioning Iran completely, I probably would do so. Because then I would have the power to do much more without sanctions.

The way 'neo-con' as a catch word is so often used here and there (replacing the good old 'imperialism'!) sounds like a well intentioned naive boy who misreads completely the outcome of his actions! If you want that the catch word 'neo-con' really sound the frightening despicable evil that 'imperialism' used to be, you should work much harder!

As it stands now, 'neo-con' doesn't sound evil. It sounds stupid... and it doesn't stick to Milani no matter how hard you try. I don't know about the other guy.


vildemose

I have no idea who Eliass

by vildemose on

I have no idea who Eliass Sajjad is but I know Milani and Sadjepour don't wish war on Iran...That is just baseless slander that I'm sure Milani and Sadjadpoir will respond in due time.

Slandering people will not add to anyone's credibility. This article does not provide one shred of evidence that Milani and Sajadpour want the US to bomb Iran or how they are trying to derail the movement from afar... 

 


Bavafa

Thank you for a great post

by Bavafa on

The enemies of Iran and Iranian are working hard to derail this movement to what they want rather what the Iranian people on the streets of Tehran and other cities want.

There are some on this very web site that advocate "airtight" and "crippling" sanctions with openly declaring that they hope it would result in bombing Iran.

The Green movement has certainly become a true movement by the Iranian people and it should remain as such to serve Iran and Iranians best interest.

Mehrdad