Esfand Aashena

Roozbeh G.

I prefere "despot éclairé" such as late Shah and Tito to any of those religiously enlightened.

Hope, made myself clear. If not, too bad. ;o)

What is EA?!

Esfand!  I didn't mean you were talking doom and gloom, I meant others.

I was just curious about what would be the relationship, was Libya selling oil to them?  Maybe they increased the price of oil and thus Yugo was born?!  Or maybe just something silly like Chavez and Ahmadi these days.

I agree tribal wars are the same anywhere, case and point in Ireland between Protestants and Catholics. 

Everything is sacred

EA

I'm not talking doom and gloom, far from it. All I'm saying is we should remain realistic.

Now, what's the relationship ?

First, ex-Yugoslavia maintained very close relations with Gadafi. However, that's the history of ex Yugoslavia, who the hell cares about it on IC ?

Second, tribal wars are all the same. Don't you ever think that tribal wars in Europe are any different from tribal wars in Libya or elsewhere. When it comes down to fighting your own, no tribe or ethnicity matters, they all fight savagely.

Honestly, I wish Libyans all the best. I also wish Iranians will decide their own destiny. Without foreign interference. That's my point.

Rea, if you support "democracy"

You support it unconditionally. Meaning people have a "democratic right" to choose an islamist state if they want to. This is nothing unusual. This is part of social evolution, self learning of all societies. It happened in Europe before and it is happening in Islamist world now.

To that end, we Iranians are ahead of our other muslim neighbours. We tried the islamist rule and all that goes with it and we are rejecting it. The next revolution will be firmly secular. Reforms and reformists in Iran are inherently of islamist persuations and to that end need to be resisted and exposed for what and who they are.

"Personal business must yield to collective interest."

"Tabarzin"

You just posted an entire "comment" dedicated to personal insults and  innuendo against me, in which you accused me of "personal attacks"!

All that because I proved you wrong on evey single  Pseudo intellectual non sense you printed on this blog and on mine. What an absulte waste of time..

BTW. I flagged your outragous personal attacks on me here, as I dont have any assistants to do the job for me.

"Personal business must yield to collective interest."

Yes they're local.

In Iraq it was after Shiites were freed from years of Saddam rule that a war started between those who were oppressed and those who had gained in the past but were set to lose them all.

In Syria, it's similar to Iraq but the opposite where 74% of country is Sunni and will likely have the same fate as Iraq.  In Lebanon it's mostly between Muslims and Christians not others.

I don't see a reason for war between Iran and Turkey or Saudis.  As long as Uncle Sam is in Persian Gulf Iran wouldn't be able get a chance to get into a war with anyone but the US! 

Everything is sacred

We saw the secterain war in

We saw the secterain war in Iraq where millions of sunnis were and have been displaced. In Lebanon, the sectarian war between the sunni and shia is simmering underneath of the society and it might erupt any day. Inter-secterain war between Egypt and Iran and Turky is a definite possiblity in the next 20 years. Part of syria's uprising is also secterian because of Asad's leniency toward shiafication of Syria. We are talking about the next 10 to 20, 30years not short-term... It takes a while for these chickens  to come home to roost.

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe." Robert Browning in 'Ceuciaja'

Mehrban

The lines between fiction and non-fiction, truth and narrative, the symbol and the symbolized, are often blurred as each ruptures into the space of the other. Narrative narrates itself into reality, if you would. That's what literary theory says, anyway. The clip from The Network is basically a succinct montage of how the world really works behind the scenes and what propels modern wars and "revolutions." It is in my view one of the most brilliant and honest pieces of cinematography ever produced out of Hollywood. You won't see something as brutally honest as that on the big screen any more.

I would like to be a fly on the wall of national security briefings for the Obama administration, but ultimately I don't think even Obama or his administration are calling the shots on such things. Board rooms, chambers of commerce and smoke filled back-rooms and handshakes behind closed doors among shady characters in the seedy world of international finance  are the ones sealing global fates, as it were.

I do know that in 1971 Benard Lewis' Green Belt Theory Paper for the Council on Foreign Relations sealed the fate of the Shah and Iran in order for America and the West to bring down the USSR and simultaneously cut to size an uppity Iranian monarch whose power was getting too much for the Anglo-American financial and political elites - and whose projects threatened the very fabric of their economic and political hegemony if completed. In the case of a Palestinian state, beyond the Palestinians themselves, I would say follow the money trail and ask who benefits, and you'll find your answer.

Sectarian wars between Shiites & Sunnis is limited 2 own country

There is no "need" for a sectarian war outside each country and the reason there is a war inside a country is because one side has ruled the other side with iron fist for so long.  AND the reason people join a sect after an uprising and toppling a regime is security.  Plain and simple, security.

In lawless lands gangs provide security.  Now there is too much risk in venturing into a regional sectarian war.  Too much to lose and not much to gain.  Saddam tried it but he didn't get anywhere.

We can't predict the future but we can see the trends.  Right now is oust the dictator and ask questions later! 

Everything is sacred

 Dear Mehrabn, here is my

 Dear Mehrabn, here is my two cents: The push toward radical Islamization of the whole region is a sinster plan  to create secterain wars between the shia and suunis in the long run, and if they don't annihilate each other, then the MIC and the dominionist  will be more than happy to start another crusade in the region in the name of war on radical Isalm without much resistance from the western world powers.

Egypt brotherhood has already fallen for this trap. Israel would not mind another 6-day war with Egypt and the Egyptian muslim brotherhood will surely will be championioning that war.

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe." Robert Browning in 'Ceuciaja'

Tabarzin

Thank you for the detailed response.  I would like to posit a possibility here.  Yesterday as I was lamenting the emergence of another Islamist regime I thought this recent trend may not be a coincidence.   

Could it be that Obama is actually serious about an autonomous Palestinian state and in fact building an islamist front in the face of Israel?  For as much as the present administration has asked and tried to form an independent Palestinian state Israel has continued building its settlements and has resisted.  Could all this Islamists states surfacing in the place of the secular states (I am not talking about Iran) be for that aim and not really oil (not so much).   There is already talk of Egypt severing diplomatic relations with Israel.   

I know as Esfand jaan :) says, only time will tell the outcome.  But I would like to know your (or anyone's) take.  

Ps.  Tabarzin, I like your complex thinking but when you use a fictional clip produced in a movie studio, as a political guide, it gives me a little pause ;).  With respect. 

dble post

dble post

Gilani

You don't reason. You don't present evidence. You don't argue in anything you post - ever. You don't possess a dialectic in anything you say either. You rant and you regurgitate transparent propaganda and deluded mainstream consensus sound-bites. Then when you are shown-up you name-call, harrass, play victim and engage in childish psychological reversals. Not only have you never proven me wrong on anything, but in every response you have made you have just reinforced my core belief about who and what you may be. As such you have forfeited any right to further discussions of any nature with me ever again, simply because you are not an intellectual and so are beneath any attempt on my part to engage you in any form of discussion.

Rea what's the relationship between Libya and ex Yugoslavia?

This whole idea that Tabarzin and some others elsewhere and here are talking about that the world is a messed up place and the West is constantly milking the third world countries and it's all bad all downhill is old news.  Really old news.

In all these countries, Iran included, the influence of world powers is well documented and people who rise up against these tyrants are well aware of it.  They're ALSO aware of the eastern block and socialist ideologues that have ALSO screwed up their own people and are less desireable in other countries, whereas West and Western culture are very desireable.  People are just timid or being forced by the religious conservatives to seek "alternatives".  Heck if you let them, they'll change America and the bill of rights as we know it.

What we're witnessing is the natural process (well almost natural in some of them ;-) of dictatorships running its course and the dream of freedoms.  Now many of these countries as Rea mentioned or as she actually went through herself, are multi-ethnic and soon resort to ethnic violence which sometimes breaks up a country.

All and all future is in the hands of the people and it's not all doom and gloom.  Things will change for the better.  We may not be here to see the better outcomes during our life times but it doesn't mean they're headed the wrong direction.  They may miss a turn or two that'd take them decades to get back to the mainstream road, but turn they'll make! 

Everything is sacred

DK

Am well aware of the fact that every society has to go thru evolution stages, step by step. Like the x-communist countries did. Rather painfull process.

Briefly, I'm not projecting Western style democracy onto Libyans, far from it. All I am saying is, let's not get euphoric again, wait n see.

Something for you to read.

//www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/quand-le-chef-des-rebelles-libyens-oeuvrait-pour-kadhafi_977428.html

Just to answer a few comments

I've been following Libya closely bcs of the ties btwn ex Yugoslavia and Libya going back to the time of Tito.

In general, when we hear about a dictator being toppled, we tend to get euphoric. At the very beginning I'd had mixed feelings about it. Then I got carried away with the crowd.

Nowadays, I'm not sure about anything. Latent clashes btwn different tribes, btwn secularists and islamists (al Qaida is well present there), btwn Arabs and Berbers. And the list is long. 

Not to mention that M. Jalil, the TNC Rep, is the very same judge in whose court the death sentence for the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor had been confirmed twice.

Lot of things to reflect upon. I just hope not another country is about to be torn apart by ethnic and/or tribal feuding.

LOL, Anahid...

Since when, and where on this world,  mentioning ones religion is offensive?

I guess only on iranian.com the "nothing is sacred" land....

"Personal business must yield to collective interest."

Roozbeh, if this is the same comment

that at the end you noted that yoy had to go back to work because of..., I flagged it because of that part.

Tabarzin, LOL, I proved you wrong & my comment got deleted!.

although there was absolutely nothing whatsoever insultive about my comment:

here what I said in my comment:

1) you dismiss a widely reported fact (decisive workers uprising in tripoli) as "nato propaganda", because it does not fit your arguement.

2) the general inconsistency of your arguments, where on one blog you back the muslim women's right to wear burka in france, and here on this blog you warn about the supposed danger of sharia law being imposed in Lybia, because lybian people demanded it.

But hey tabarzin, if you get  upset about being proven wrong so much, just tell me and I flag my own comment myself! 

This comment, deleted or not is my last to you sir. I am getting a bit old for this kind of games, and have better things to do in life than competing for popularity contest on an internet forum.....

"Personal business must yield to collective interest."

Mehrban

Ghadaffi was a tyrant brought to power with the assent of the Western intelligence agencies during the late 1960s. It was the West's weapons and Western weapons dealers that maintained him in power. The West, beginning with Ronald Reagan, then turned against him. In recent years he had given up his belligerent anti-Westernism, but like the West always does, they turned against him - as they have done with everyone else.

The IR/PLO connection re: the Iranian Devolution would make sense in a world that actually worked in the sort of binary oppositions the media conglomerate misinformation would have us believe. The world does not actually work that way, and in Iran's case the role of the Persian section of the BBC in acting as the anti-Shah bully-pulpit is too glaring to dismiss as any kind of anomaly. In Libya we have had al-Qaeda mercenaries working the streets of Libya's cities at the beginning of the conflict, fighting in the front ranks of the rebel anti-Ghadaffi forces throughout the conflict, all the while liasing with NATO and Western intelligence spooks on the ground. To a rational mind used to the false binaries that official  spin feeds us, this does not make any sense. But to those who see the patterns and have an understanding of the actual hussle and bussle street-logic of the dirty world of international finance qua geopolitics, this is exactly how the world works. It is a dirty dog eat dog world we live in!

That said, none of this about Ghadaffi. Ghadaffi was a tyrant, yes, but just as with the Shah time will prove that the tyranny of "brother-leader's" dictatorship was exagerrated. Ghadaffi brought stability to Libya over the years; but more importantly Ghadaffi together with several other African leaders were actually in the process of re-aligning African currency and economic financial arrangements so that eventually a pan-African economic bloc together with a Pan-African Bank would form that would take Africa out of the unequal relationship Africa has maintained with global financial institutions, allowing Africa to prosper on its own terms. In essence Ghadaffi and his African allies took on the IMF/WTO regime, and the current chaos in Libya is ultimately the IMF/WTO's response and doing. This is colonialism - pure and simple.

Sound familiar? Wasn't the Shah attempting something similar in Iran and the Mid East (from OPEC on up) when literally overnight a Devolution was orchestrated against him and Iran plunged into the nightmare of the past 33-32 years? There was no reasonable economic or viable sociological basis for Iran to explode into a so-called Revolution and transform from a modern developing secular yet traditionalist state into a militant totalitarian theocracy. None.

Look at this video below, please. It is a scene from the 1976 film The Network 

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqEcLlp_Big&feature=player_embedded

This is what we are dealing with.

Tabarzin but Gadhafi was a tyrant, right?

- Why hand these countries to the moslem brothers (lower case :) after the uprisings.   I know I am taking a leap but I see a connection between the blog you posted on Edward Said and your discussion here.  

-  the existense of PLO in the streets of Iran for a simple observer speaks of the IR/PLO axes. how does it translate to the Plutocrat/IR?  Or that is not what you meant?

BtW,  I am not arguing that there was not foreign involvement in the Iranian revolution of 79. 

Look here...

//news.antiwar.com/2011/08/23/rent-seekers-race-to-profit-in-war-torn-libya/

"Major businesses are gunning for first dibs on Libya’s natural resources as a new race to turn a profit out of the war-torn nation begins.
Many business leaders, most with close connections to their respective
governments, are planning to send representatives to Benghazi to meet
leaders of the Transitional National Council (TNC)."

"Expectedly, those governments involved in the air campaign and proxy war
to oust Gadhafi have had a jump start in facilitating the corporatist
industrial and reconstruction plans. France and Germany have already
begun trade negotiations with the TNC, and Britain and America — which
has spent nearly one billion dollars on the war — are sure to follow suit."

War = Multinational Corporate Profit

Mehrban

Yes, this is all about Oil.

Tabarzin

In your view what is the advatage of getting rid of (for example Gadafi) in Libya for the plutocrats (your word) :).  Control of more Oil?

I am quite suspect of BHL after his endorsement of the war in Iraq.  

I am watching some of the events in ME and little makes sense for example the unravelling of Egypt's uprising into the hands of Muslim brothers (it seems).   

And go watch this film as well..

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTa2PTcycyI

Roozbeh

 The final victory over Gadaffi came about due to massive worker uprising in Tripoli.

This is the poppyock the NATO misinformation outlets wants you to believe which shameless Neo-Liberal propagandists in the West are spreading through the press on behalf of their criminal plutocratic masters who engineered the destruction of Libya! The proposed 1st article of this new Libyan constitution says everything in black and white as does the fact that the so-called rebel anti-Ghadaffi revolutionaries were composed predominantly of al-Qaeda mercenaries.

The so called "intellectuals" need to step down their 1960's
designed cloud coocoo land  and learn that democracy means the
implementation of the will of people, be it shariat law, adam smith law
or god  forbid Marx law

Would that be like the will of the people that claimed to see reflections of Khomeini on the moon or the one where the PLO was working the streets of Iran all throughout the end of 1978 up to the middle of February 1979? The will of the people in this case is a will that has been manipulated by powerful plutocratic criminals sitting in Washington, New York, Paris and London. It is the will of plutocrats that brought down Ghadaffi just as it was the will of these same plutocrats that brought down the Shah in 1979. If you want to talk about the will of the people let's talk about Somalia or any other number of tin-pot dictatorships in the Third World the Western crocodiles don't shed a tear for. What about the will of the people in Bahrain?

Here is an article about the will of the people in Libya regarding the assassination of one of the former rebel military commanders.  //www.mathaba.net/news/?x=628004

And go watch this film to figure out what has really happened in Libya //www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnSauj2855M

Comparing Iran

Comparing Iran with any country and specially comparing Iranian nation with any other nation would be wrong, here are the reasons.

We have a problem with past and all we think about past.

We demonstrate part time not a full time.

We have 450 parties and none of these parties willing to share the room.

We are not angry people like Libyan or Syrian.

We have made so many mistakes and now we trying to have a revolution on IC, at least it is safer and nobody will die. After our IC revolution completed we will use the same platform in the country.

We have so many intellectual, but Arabs are free of intellectuals.

We do business with regime thugs but at the same time we fight them on IC.

We hate shah and Mosadegh but Arabs are free of hating kings and icons.

We love Islam deep down but hate it on IC. But Arabs hate themselves if they don’t say Allah a Akbar.

How these countries ever could understand democracy and freedom?

It is impossible for Syria or Libya or Egypt or Yamane or Iraqi or any Muslim country in North Africa or Middle East to understand fundamental of democracy, the society is beyond our imagination they true primitive to have a dialog or understanding and compromise. There is no social structure and there is not been social reform ever in those countries. If you look at the Libya or Syria or Egypt, society and their demonstration, how many women would you find shoulder to shoulder with their brothers in the streets compare with Iran they are primitive, they are socially far behind.   Doesn’t matter how much they try, they cannot built the society that will respect one another because there is no foundation and these people need social reform like Reza Shah did to Iran.

You see he doesn't even know if Leili was a man or a woman!

Everything is sacred

Well Truthseeker

Glad to hear that! I want to remind other people (I am sure you remembers). I did make a mistake about one of your posts and when I realized it I retracted my post.

About the other people you mention. The first one I have vowed not to speak about. If you see the posts I initially made one post asking her some questions. Then I posted about other things. The person mistakenly thought I was implying something about her and that started the argument. In reality I was not even thinking about her except for the one post with the questions none of which were in any way insulting.

Regarding the writer of this blog. I was one of the first people to welcome her back to IC when she returned. Sure we had a few arguments but nothing that was that big. I don't even know where the anger comes from! Honestly if you want to talk I just as soon move to our own blog. Let me know and I will start one. I don't really want to be in this exclusive "clique" anyway :-)

Truthseeker you want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

You see you've already fallen for his nonsense!  I wouldn't have any problem for his sorry arse to come here and leave a comment or two or three.  But he is way beyond what is normal tolerance.

If you have time go take a look and see of all these blogs that have been most discussed what percentage of comments belong to his sorry arse.  I'd say he litters these contributions by 60% - 70% of his nonsense.

Maybe others like it and encourage him or engage him to run up the comments, but I don't.  I don't want people to come in and go through the thread and see bunch of nonsense.  In other blogs I just skip over him but here in my own house I can't.

What do you suggest I do?  What would you do if an arrogant snob comes to your house, to your party, uninvited and acts like a fool?  This is not the first time I've asked him.  Have you seen me engage him elsewhere?

Bottom line despite what my reactions may look like, I don't care anymore.  I realize that despite the free forum we have here JJJ is the VF and I've had many discussions and blogs about this issue.  If you want I can provide link to some of them.  Until then I'll flag his arse, not by using the flag button, but by telling him to take his sorry arse elsewhere. 

Everything is sacred