( RFE/ RL ) – Iranian police released singer Parastoo Ahmadi in the early hours of December 15 following a brief detention after she performed without the mandatory head scarf, her lawyer has confirmed.

Ahmadi caused a stir on social media earlier this week after recording a performance with her hair uncovered and wearing a dress. The performance, recorded with a crew of male musicians, was uploaded to YouTube.

The police on December 14 claimed she was released after a “briefing session” but a source close to the family told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that she remained in custody. Her lawyer Milad Panahipur also denied the police claim, writing on X that the authorities were “lying” about her release.

The following day, Panahipur confirmed Ahmadi, who had been detained in her home province of Mazandaran, was released at 3 in the morning.

Two of her bandmates, Soheil Faqih-Nasri and Ehsan Beyraqdar, were also detained briefly.

Ahmadi’s Instagram account is no longer accessible, but her YouTube account remains active.

The video of her performance, dubbed “an imaginary concert” because female performers cannot sing solo in front of an audience, has received around 1.6 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded on December 11.

On December 12, the authorities said legal proceedings had been launched against Ahmadi and her bandmates for the “illegal concert.”

Ahmadi, who gained prominence during the 2022 nationwide protests after singing a song in support of demonstrators, has been widely praised for her performance.

On social media, many have hailed her for fighting “gender apartheid” and showing “bravery, resilience, and love.”

A rising number of women have been flouting the mandatory hijab in public since the 2022 protests, which gave rise to the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

The authorities have tried to crack down and recently passed a law enhancing the enforcement of the hijab by introducing hefty fines, restricting access to basic services, and lengthy prison sentences.

The new hijab and chastity law, which has been widely criticized by even conservative figures, is scheduled to go into effect this month, but at least two lawmakers have said its implementation has been postponed by the Supreme National Security Council.

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Parastoo Ahmadi: “Karvansara Concert, Parastoo Ahmadi”

Khamenei on December 11 also implicitly blamed Turkey for the lightning push of Syrian rebels who reached Damascus from their strongholds in the northwest with little resistance.

“It should not be doubted that what happened in Syria was the product of a joint American and Zionist plot,” he said.

“Yes, a neighboring government of Syria plays, played, and is playing a clear role…but the main conspirator, mastermind, and command center are in America and the Zionist regime,” Khamenei added.

The U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies — some of whom are linked with Turkey — ousted Assad on December 8, less than two weeks after launching their offensive.

Syria under Assad served as a crucial part of a land corridor connecting Iran to the Levant, which was considered the logistical backbone of the so-called axis of resistance — Iran’s loose network of regional proxies and allies.

Iran spent billions of dollars and sent military advisers to Syria to ensure Assad remained in power when civil war broke out in 2011.

Russia — where the ousted Syrian leader has been granted political asylum — also backed Assad, while Turkey has supported rebel groups who aimed to topple the regime.

A Khamenei adviser once described Syria as the “golden ring” in the chain connecting Iran to its Lebanese partner, Hezbollah. With the ring broken and Hezbollah’s capabilities degraded after a devastating war with Israel, experts say the axis has become severely weak.

“Foiled,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Khamenei said only “ignorant and uninformed analysts” would assess that the axis has become weak and vowed that its reach “will expand across the region more than before.”

Reza Alijani, an Iranian political analyst based in France, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that Khamenei’s comments were more “trash talk” than anything else.

“The axis may not have been defeated, but it has suffered a serious blow and the Islamic republics arms in the region have been deal major hits,” he said.

Alijani argued that factions within the Islamic republic’s core support base may be starting to question Khamenei’s policies and vision after the recent setbacks, which he said is a cause for concern among the clerical establishment’s top brass.

With reporting by Hooman Askary of RFE/RL’s Radio Farda

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Damascus is the prize.

Damascus has an Achilles heel. It is landlocked, deep in the south of the country, and far from the port of Latakia that supplies it.

The other nearby port, Beirut in Lebanon, is a shadow of its former self, and the Lebanese government has closed the borders with Syria. You could get some things in from Iraq by truck, but the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have taken all of Deir al-Zor province and the checkpoint of Al-Bukamal on the Syrian side of the Syria-Iraq border has fallen to the SDF.

Food, weapons and ammunition have to come from Latakia. The truck route from Latakia down to Damascus passes through Homs.

The fundamentalist Sunni Arab militia, the HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or the Levant Liberation Council), led by a former al-Qaeda affiliate, had Idlib. In the past week it has taken Aleppo and then moved south to take Hama. (These territories are green in the below map from “X”.)

Homs is next. If the Tahrir al-Sham takes Homs, it can cut Damascus off from resupply.

Game over.

This is the current latest status map of the Civil War in #Syria

Red: Assad’s army, the official army of Syria, aka SAA
Green: all the sub rebels groups
Yellow: kurds
[Hashtags (ignore): #Pushpa2TheRule    #SpotifyWrapped #pragyanagra #Bitcoin ] pic.twitter.com/SCnG7pUmqD

— The_Airplane_Master (@plane12429) December 7, 2024

In 2012-2013, when the fundamentalist Sunni rebels, including al-Qaeda, had taken Homs, they were pushed back out by the intervention of Iran and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia alongside the remnants of the Syrian Arab Army. The fundamentalist hopes of cutting off Damascus were dashed.

In 2015, the Sunni fundamentalists in Idlib in the north of Syria tried out a Plan B, which was simply to take Latakia itself. That would also cut off Damascus from resupply.

Iran and Hezbollah could not muster the sheer manpower to stop this from happening. The Sunni fundamentalists were getting backing from Turkey and the Gulf, and the Syrian Arab Army had seen two-thirds of its troops (mostly themselves Sunni) desert. Hezbollah probably only really has 25,000 fighters despite exaggerated claims, and they were spread thin in Syria and in Lebanon itself. (Lebanon is a small country of maybe 4.5 million citizens, and only a third or so are Shiites, and only half of Shiites support Hezbollah. So it just isn’t that large an organization).

So it is alleged that in the summer of 2015, the head of Iran’s Qods Force, the special operations unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, flew to Moscow and informed Russian President Vladimir Putin that Iran had done all it could. If Russia did not want to see Syria fall to the Sunni fundamentalists led by al-Qaeda — with all its implications for nearby Russian Muslim-majority areas such as Chechnya — then Putin would have to intervene.

On September 30, 2015, Russia started flying air support missions in Syria for the Syrian Arab Army, Hezbollah, and Iraqi Shiite militias, against the Sunni fundamentalists. This combination of ground forces and Russian air support succeeded in defeating the rebels and bottling them up in Idlib in the north.

Therefore, in some ways the fate of the al-Assad government was sealed when President Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The Russian Aerospace Forces became bogged down in the Ukraine War and were simply not available in the same way for deployment in Syria.

The Russian Federation is pulling up stakes and leaving Syria. The embassy in Damascus said on Telegram Friday that owing to the “difficult” military and political situation in Syria, Russian citizens living in the Syrian Arab Republic were encouraged to take the next commercial flight out of the country. (H/t BBC Monitoring). BBC Monitoring also reports that Russian military bloggers had warned this week that if Homs fell, Russia would lose its military bases in Syria.

Homs fell.

“Running Away,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Now veteran Iran correspondent Farnaz Fassihi reports at NYT that Iran is withdrawing from Syria.

I suggest that Tehran has no choice but to leave Syria. Without Russian air support, the couple thousand Revolutionary Guards and the remnants of the Hezbollah forces in the country, along with the tattered Syrian Arab Army, cannot hope to defeat the rebels now any more than they could in 2015. The situation is even worse than in in the summer of 2015, since Hezbollah’s forces have been devastated by the recent war with Israel, which saw their commanders blinded or crippled by Israeli booby traps and many of their tactical personnel killed or wounded in battle. Moreover, if Hezbollah attempted to deploy in a big way in Syria now, without Russian air support, Israel would hit them. Russia had offered them their only air defense umbrella, and then only as long as they were doing Russian bidding in targeting the Sunni fundamentalists.

Russian air power made the difference then. Without it, the Syrian government and its few allies are doomed.

Gary Sick. Courtesy Columbia University.

Fariba Amini: How do you see Trump’s internal and foreign policy agenda in the coming year?  

Gary Sick: Compared to chaotic time of Trump’s last administration, he may be better prepared this time. This is a good sign, but history is not linear. It doesn’t go in one direction. In this particular case, I think it was the combination of having gone through the pandemic and the worst inflation that people remember very clearly—showed the government of the United States did not handle the right way. There was a tremendous demand for change, and that was not only true in the United States, but throughout the world. It is a grand movement following the pandemic and economic problems. So, in all of the world, we have seen changes in governments, people coming out of nowhere, and people who previously believed unelectable suddenly finding themselves supported by the populace for somebody different who will shake things up.

Trump, as an agent of change, stands for truly challenging the government, our history and background, and the kind of things we grew up with. He is prepared to challenge all of those. That’s an enormous undertaking and hugely impactful, because he actually changes the way the United States leads many other countries in the world, changes the whole security balance in the world. One can imagine that he got a second chance to decide what he wanted to do in his first administration. I hope he does not, but he may. If he does, it’s going to mean that the United States is heading into a perilous security position.

For many years, NATO has essentially become part of the institution of stability in terms of military security. If he changes that, or if he wants his generals to have personal loyalty to him, that’s not how the US government works, and it’s not how the US Constitution is written. But he seems prepared to try. He is accurately reflecting the views of the people who voted for him. They want to shake things up, challenge the status quo, and change the way things are done because they don’t believe the current system is working. They don’t think about the consequences; they just say let’s shake things up and see what happens. He has these big ideas.

My guess is that he has two years to get all of his big ideas done, and at the end of those two years, we’ll have a new bi-election, with a very real chance that the Democrats could take control of either the House or the Senate, or both, because a lot of people are not going to like him — even the people who supported him. He makes changes in Medicare, for instance, in Social Security. A lot of Americans rely on that, and they are going to take it very seriously. So, he has these two years and will bring people whose sole expertise is their love for Donald Trump and who will do what he wants to do.

The next two years are going to be absolutely chaotic, and really, we are going to see if the people who voted for Trump will be happy with the kind of program he may come up with. So, I expect a lot of crazy ideas, maybe some good ideas. I think at the end of the fourth year, he’s going to say, I need to get all the things done that I should because people want me to do this. He may try to effect a third term. I think that is going to be very much in his mind, if not already, I think that will be the case at the end of the fourth year. He will be convinced that only a part of his program is enacted, and he still has a huge amount to do. We will see.

Fariba Amini: Trump has been boasting that within 24 hours of his presidency he will end the war in Ukraine. Do you think a Trump administration can resolve the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine?

Gary Sick: It’s far from clear what he would come up with. My guess is that he is talking about what he won’t be able to do. Basically, he might agree to something that is substantially suicidal. Trump’s advice is basically to make a deal with the Russians in which Vladimir Zelensky gives up territory. That is not going to go over very well in Ukraine, so Zelensky knows that his life is on the line.

At a certain time, he was a great buddy of Netanyahu, who doesn’t want to see the war end. I don’t think he is going to solve that. It is not clear that there is a solution, because from the Palestinian point of view, there should be at least a minimum recognition of a two-state solution. But the government of Israel is simply not thinking about that. The Israeli people don’t like Netanyahu and his politics and are unhappy with the way the war is going, but there is no opposition, or the opposition is so weak that Netanyahu is able to simply keep on going. Of course, Netanyahu, among other things, tries to stay away from jail, and as long as he is prime minister, he is free from going to jail or facing charges of corruption. So, under such circumstances, it’s difficult to see how this is going to end.

Basically, Israel is still fighting in Gaza, but it really cannot get rid of all the people who are Hamas supporters. Hamas is not very popular in Palestinian circles and in Gaza these days, but basically, people like the idea of challenging the Israelis and showing that they are not invulnerable. That is the question of deterrence. Israel sees this as a case where they have to prove that attacking Israel is very costly, and they thought they had done that. But if they think they’ve solved it this time around, they are wrong. They have probably put themselves in a position where this war in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon is going to be long for some time to come.

Fariba Amini: Since October 7, 2023, more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.  The numbers may be even higher with many lying under the rubble.  Many civilians have also been killed in Lebanon.   How do you see the future for Israel, for Gaza and Lebanon?

Gary Sick: The reality is that Israel thinks that the solution to its problems includes basically wiping out a lot of people. If you look at the Israeli strategy in Gaza is exactly the reverse of what the laws of war would require. The laws of war say that if you locate two Hamas members in an apartment building, you want to get them, but if there are 150 civilians in that building, you have to back off. You can get in on foot and find those two men, but you shouldn’t just bomb the building because there are civilians in the way. The Israeli strategy up to this point has been exactly the reverse.

Where there is suspected Hamas leaders at any point in any situation, their answer to that is a bomb, which is indiscriminate and kills a gathering of civilians in a refugee camp, around hospitals, or schools. If you have a huge group of civilians, that should mean that you don’t bomb, but in Israel’s case, they decided to kill a large group of civilians where there is one or two Hamas people in that group. The answer to that is a bomb and that’s what’s going on. So, the number of civilians, women and children, who have been killed is unbelievable and incredibly high. Whatever you want to call, you can call it, but the reality is that they have reversed the laws of war in conducting the campaign in Gaza. In Beirut, they were bombing apartment buildings where leaders of Hezbollah are located.

Israel is going to have to face the outcome of this war with a real loss of dignity and support from a lot of people. You see that in the American capital. A lot of Americans, including actually a lot of American Jews, are in awe of what Israel has been doing. There are also people who are in favor of how Israel is handling it, but it has changed a lot of people’s attitudes towards Israel in a way that was hard to imagine a year or two ago. We don’t know how he is going to deal with it. As far as I can tell, as long as Netanyahu, who wants to continue the war, is the prime minister, with people around him who want to use means that are extremely deadly for a lot of civilians, this war is just going to go on. I don’t think that until Netanyahu changes his mind, or Israel is led by somebody else, the circumstances will change. I don’t think there is any answer to this situation as long as the people who are involved remain in power.

Fariba Amini: Why does the U.S. administration continue to arm Israel while we know that thousands of civilians have been killed with the weapons we’ve sent them?  

Gary Sick: Israel of course insists that it is taking precautions, but they assert that Hamas officials and fighters are taking refuge behind civilians which means that a lot of civilians are killed. Israel asserts that the number of casualties is far smaller than the Gazan Ministry of Health numbers and that the percentage of “terrorists” killed is much higher, but they offer no details. It is my impression that the USG accepts much of the Israeli rationale, at least for purposes of arms sales. Theoretically US arms provide a bargaining leverage that can be used to pressure Israel for greater attention to civilian casualties, but that lever never seems to be used in practice. The Israeli/US position is not very convincing and is contradicted by virtually every neutral source.

Fariba Amini: Do you think a war on Iran is inevitable?

Gary Sick: Trump is the one who is to blame for this. He is the one who walked away from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal] that was agreed to by the Obama administration. His argument was that it was a bad agreement and that he would now be able to put maximum pressure on Iran to keep them from expanding their nuclear facilities. Of course, exactly the reverse happened. When he walked away from the JCPOA, the Iranians waited for almost a year to see if he would change his mind. He did not.

So, they began responding, and from a situation where it would have taken Iran almost a year to get enough fissile material from enriched uranium to build a bomb, it became a matter of days or weeks. He’s going to put pressure on Iran to stop their nuclear program and reverse it. Whether he comes to admit that his policy is derailed, I don’t think so, and I think his answer is to put pressure back. That’s not going to work, but that’s his approach. It’s hard to see how anything is going to come out of it.

Iran has not made the decision to build the bomb, but it has made the decision to create enough material for a number of bombs in a very short period of time. Israel may want to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but the facilities that Iran has built, with all the centrifuges, are deep in the ground. They are very difficult targets, and the Israelis have the capacity to hit them, but they’ve been cautious about going after very ambitious targets. So, when Trump comes in January, we’re going to face a new world.

I don’t know what that is going to look like, but from everything we know from the past, he is not going to do a deal with Iran. He’s going to impose new sanctions on Iran and put more pressure on Iran, and I think we’ve seen enough examples of that from the Bush administration onwards. But putting pressure through sanctions on Iran would not change Iran’s policies or their nuclear capability. Now, for better or worse, Iran has the capacity to decide to build a bomb and do it very quickly. We can’t do much about that. That is very much because of Trump’s policy of walking away from the JCPOA.

Fariba Amini: I always thought the decision to walk away from the nuclear deal was made in Tel Aviv and not Washington. What is your take?  

Gary Sick: Do you mean the decision to walk away from the JCPOA? I think Israel is quite happy with that, but I don’t think they are the ones who made it happen. Netanyahu was pushing Trump to walk away, so indeed they were satisfied with that. But I think he already believed that; he didn’t have to be persuaded. It’s almost as if he wanted Iran to have a bomb. This is not just true of Republican administrations; this was true of Democrat administrations, except for Obama, who worked out the JCPOA.

Fariba Amini: Turning to a different subject, now that you have retired from running Gulf 2000, after thirty years: how did you come up with the idea?  And what is its future?

Gary Sick: Let me give you a very brief description of my experience with Gulf 2000. Basically, I worked for the Ford foundation, then I quit and decided to work for myself. George Perkovich at the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, VA, called me in about 1992 and said that he did not believe that the Persian Gulf was getting the scholarly attention it deserved. He asked if I had any suggestions. I asked him for a small grant and spent a few months researching various possibilities.

One of the things I learned was that scholars in various Gulf countries seldom talked to each other. I proposed a series of conferences consisting almost entirely of scholars from each of the Gulf states. He agreed and gave me a grant to cover conference costs.  I called the project Gulf2000 since I thought it would probably end in a few years, and that seemed suitably forward-looking. We did hold a series of conferences, mostly in Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean countries that built a personal relationship among regional scholars and produced a series of scholarly books consisting of the papers written for the meetings.

The internet and email emerged during this same time, and the members of our group began communicating with each other via this new form of communication. I opened up the project to other regional scholars, and within a relatively short time, scholars from all over the world began to use it. At the turn of the millennium, we renamed it G2K, and it became a useful virtual meeting place for Gulf experts, with a membership of about 1,600, which was supported by a series of major foundations via grants to Columbia University, where I taught.

By the time that G2K moved from Columbia to the Sage Institute in Virginia in September of 2024, it had more than tripled my original estimate of its sell-by date and was still going strong.

Later, he taught at Columbia University and for nearly 30 years ran the website Gulf 2000 which has been a thoughtful forum for discussions regarding Middle East politics for its members- analysts and commentators alike.  

He is emeritus member of the board of directors of Human Rights Watch and serves as founding chair of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East.

He has authored three books among them, October Surprise:  America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.

He is now retired. 

Gary Sick. Courtesy Columbia University.

Fariba Amini: There are Iranians as well as Americans who believe in conspiracy theories. They are convinced that the Iranian revolution was a byproduct of the meeting in Guadaloupe or that it was Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy that brought about the revolution in Iran.    You said in an interview that while Jimmy Carter was president, the Shah and his aides were not worried about a revolution and that they claimed they had everything under control. You were at the White House while telegrams were coming from Tehran about the deteriorating circumstances. What do you say to these people?

Gary Sick: First of all, the Guadaloupe meeting [4-7 January 1979] was the very end of the revolution, not the beginning. It was after most of the revolution had already taken place, and demonstrations were still going on, Khomeini’s presence in Paris and then in Tehran, etc… The Guadaloupe meeting was an attempt by Western leaders, Carter and a handful of others, to literally decide what happened in the revolution and where it would lead. I’ve never heard that theory that the Guadaloupe meeting was the cause of the revolution, it was the effect of revolution. The quotation you were quoting was not the quotation by me, it was by Richard Helms, who was the head of the CIA and then was the ambassador to Tehran. He went to Iran in the middle of 1978 to seek for himself what was happening and what was going on, and because of his background he had access to everybody he wanted to talk to, including the SAVAK, the military and the Shah himself.

I talked to him sometime after he had come back. He said these were not nervous men, they were not thinking about whether they should flee or what would happen with the revolution. This was in the middle of 1978 and the revolution was underway, but the people around the Shah did not really believe that was going to happen. As far as they were concerned, they stayed very much where they worked, this was their view, and it was wrong. But this was the same view that was true in the United States as well, because the CIA had briefings and white papers that were produced in July and August, which said that Iran was not in a revolutionary, or even a pre-revolutionary, agitation. That was wrong too, very wrong.

The people who were closest to the situation starting with the Shah but going down to his lieutenants and the American intelligence service, all believed that the Shah was in control and that the people who were in the streets were in effect going to be defeated. Why were they so wrong? Well, they were wrong because there was an assumption in their view that the Shah oversaw what was going on and in fact would be able to end it, by taking firm action, cracking down on the demonstrators, putting people in jail, all variety of things he could do, including changes in the government itself. What took them by surprise was that the Shah was not prepared to take a firm action, and in fact actions came hesitantly and they were inconsistent. He would be up one day and relaxed the next day. So, people who were watching what was going on expected him to take a very firm action to end the demonstrations and that didn’t happen.

There was a mess probably not because of how the Shah acted but because of how the military acted. They cracked down and shot people, but there was inconsistency, because he pulled back and did not continue with the crackdown. He imposed martial law in November, but it was incomplete, because in fact the martial law that he imposed he put the chief of staff of the arm forces in charge of the military government, and he was a pussycat, he was not a tough guy. The tough guys, the army generals who could crack down in a variety of ways, they were doing any good, because the Shah was not taking their advice. He was not doing what they suggested, and the Shah had this incredible vision of himself as his almost umbilical relationship with the Iranian public. He said on many occasions that a king does not shoot his own people. Well, he was wrong. That’s not true. Kings shoot their own people all the time and in various circumstances, but the Shah was not prepared to crack down and start shooting people all the time. As a result, all those people who, in summer 1978, believed that the Shah had taken total control were wrong. They were wrong, because they were wrong about the Shah, not because they were wrong about what was going on in the streets.

Fariba Amini: Was the Shah’s decision to leave due to his illness?  Or did he not want to leave a legacy of violence vis-à-vis the people?   He wanted to leave, knowing that he would never return, in hopes that his legacy would be that of a benevolent monarch.

Gary Sick: He was ill, and I think he didn’t have any expectations. In fact, if you go back and see the timeline, when he was first diagnosed, his doctors’ assessments, and judging from the past, the survival rate was about five years. If you think about it, it was exactly five years from the time he was diagnosed until he died. I don’t know if he fully understood that, or he believed it but he was fading in a significant way. Maybe he thought he knew all well, but he kept it as one of the great state secrets. Absolutely, no one was supposed to know. He had a potentially fatal disease that affected him in an essential way he couldn’t have expected. Perhaps he realized that he had a very serious disease and that it would be fatal. He was aware of every stage that if this fact became public, it would mean that states all around the world would change their views. They would begin to think about what would happen to their relationship with the Shah and who to deal with when the Shah was gone. He did not want that to happen because it was going to weaken his ability to negotiate. So he kept that as a very tight state secret.

I can tell you that the United States government, with all its different activities, did not know with any certainty what was going on with the Shah, and the first time that it knew for sure was when the Shah was in Cuernavaca, and he looked like he was dying. They brought doctors from New York to look at him. He wouldn’t tell them what his problem was, and they thought it was a tropical disease, like malaria or something of that sort. But he wouldn’t tell them, and it was one of his doctors from France came to see him, then he met with Americans who were taking care of the Shah and told them everything about the fact that he had diagnosed with lymphoma and that he was seriously ill, that he had not wanted them to do any kind of operation on him. Keeping that secret while he was on the throne made sense.

After he left Iran keeping that secret was less and less important or useful or necessary, but he kept that anyway. I think he had just come to believe that it was not something he wanted anybody to know, anywhere in the world. And they did not until his doctors finally said what was going on, and then he needed to go to a hospital for emergency treatment, after which he came to New York and Jimmy Carter made that decision to bring him to New York. He could have gone to several other places. Probably he should have. Carter was very reluctant to do that. He had all his advisors gathered at a meeting in one room in the Whitehouse. He went around the room, and they all said they thought they should bring the Shah to the United States for treatment.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. Public Domain. Via Get Archive.

Fariba Amini: Why was President Carter reluctant? 

Gary Sick: He realized that if the Shah went to the United States the Iranians would react very badly to that. You remember 1953 when the coup took place. The Shah fled to Rome, stayed there for a while and then came back, and reestablish himself on the throne, after the coup taking place. So, Iranians remembered that the Shah had left Iran and used that a basis to come back and reclaim his position on the throne. Carter was absolutely correct. He knew that Iran, both elite and popular, would believe that the Shah going to the United States after a long time in Egypt, Morocco, and the Bahamas, then ending up in Mexico, and that Carter inviting him to the United States, was the first step to regaining the throne. He was right. That was exactly what the students who took the hostages all believed. When Carter was meeting with his advisors, they said, for political reasons, that the Shah was a friend of ours and keeping him out would reject that part of our background. Carter was in the middle of an election campaign and his advisors said from a political point of view let bring the Shah to the United States for treatment and Carter ended up that meeting by saying: “Ok. I hear what you say. Let the Shah come in, but what are you going to tell me when they take our people hostage in Tehran? He predicted that.

Fariba Amini: It seems that Iranians always like to blame “others” when it comes to anything that’s gone wrong in our history.   How do you see this?

Gary Sick: Basically, a lot of people were hurt badly by the Shah’s departure and the revolution. They lost money, property, their lands, their culture and history. You have a lot of very important people living in Los Angeles. Are they going to be happy about this? Of course not. When I speak to some of these groups, I say: “Did you stay there and fight for the Shah?” No. They all ran.

You can blame Jimmy Carter if you like, but the people who are really to blame are the people who were around the Shah. They are looking for an excuse. For somebody who wants to believe that Jimmy Carter invited the Ayatollahs to take over, if they really believe that you’ll never persuade them, because it’s a very convenient argument, which means that they are not to blame, but somebody else is. I don’t blame them necessarily, except to say that it’s not true. There’s nothing else to be said. Jimmy Carter did not spend all his nights and days thinking about how to get rid of the Shah; he had a lot of other things to do at that time.

Fariba Amini: Jimmy Carter was involved in the Camp David accord at that time, and so Iran was not on his priority list, right?  

Gary Sick: Camp David is absolutely an example, but he was also involved in Panama Canal Treaty, negotiations with the soviets, and a whole range of issues that were earth-shaking and very important. He didn’t know what to do. The Shah did not ask for help at all, and did not say, would you come and do this for me? He never said that. He never asked for a solution. He had plenty of solutions, however. The military had been working out every day. In fact, there were several formal presentations made to the Shah to put an end to the revolution and street riots led by revolutionaries, clerics and others. The military said, we know who these people are; let us arrest them and hold them so that they are not able to direct the revolution and get them out of the way, and the remaining people there would break up. We’ll make sure to break up demonstrations so that they never occur, and don’t have to shoot everybody to do that. But you have to be present. You must have military forces. Let us in fact break up demonstrations that are taking place.

The Shah was unwilling to do that and turned them down. SAVAK had an approach quite like this, but he turned that down. He was unwilling to take hard action. He had a very equipped army. He had money and he was well equipped, but he didn’t use them. The one exception was Zhaleh square, where the troops there opened fire. That was not on the Shah’s order, but they took it upon themselves to begin shooting, and it was a horrendous outburst in Iran. Zhaleh square event was one of the turning points in Iranian revolution. So, they did shoot people during this and reaction in Iran and elsewhere was very strong and very negative. For whatever reason, either because of the Shah’s attachment to the idea of kingship or the fact that he thought it was against his principles, he was reluctant to take that kind of action.

Andrew Cooper, in his good book The Fall of Heaven, for the first time got permission from the queen and basically interviewed all the people who were in the court at the time, gathering their views about what the Shah was saying, including people who had dinner with the Shah in the palace and what they were thinking at the time. One that came out of that is that he understood better than the people around him how serious the situation was. He was, in fact, smarter and better informed than most people believed. However, he misunderstood that you don’t need to tell everybody. But people like Rafsanjani and others, who were running the revolution on the ground, if they had been arrested and taken away from the whole thing, could have had things sorted out. He was given the opportunity and the suggestion, but he didn’t do it.

I think there are huge unanswered questions about what was going on, because the Shah had all the instruments of coercion he could have used and didn’t have to tell anybody to do this, but he refused to do it. Basically, he sat back and let the revolution take its course without taking very strong actions to stop it. I don’t have answer for that, but I do think that it is the real unanswered question about the Iranian revolution.

US Embassy Hostage Crisis in Tehran, November 4, 1979. Public Domain. Courtesy Picryl.

Fariba Amini: We are now in the aftermath of an election in this country.  Trump has won and Harris lost but not by a great margin.  What do you think went wrong?   Why did the d democrats lose the elections? 

Gary Sick: I don’t pretend to be an expert on US politics that is not my principal subject, but I follow them just like everybody else. On this subject, the Democrats are in the midst of carrying out a full scale post-mortem of the election, which I think in the end will turn a few key issues. I see two things that I think are important, one is inflation after the COVID pandemic already because of tremendous amount of spending to stop the pandemic. So, prices went up, and people saw that every time they went to the grocery store or whatever they were doing. They were trying to buy a house; they felt that they saw it, although Biden did everything pretty much according to the book. All the councils by his economic advisors and all his actions were very carefully designed to stop the inflation, which they did. The inflation quit going up, but the prices didn’t go back down.

If you want to criticize the Biden administration, you would say, I can’t abide these price increases. There was a tremendous amount of anger and disappointment that Biden should have made prices go back down. Once it goes up, it almost never comes back down. In fact, there won’t necessarily be deflation. So, that was one thing, and I think there are various explanations for how the Federal Reserve and other forces have combined to save the U.S. economy. You can still make these arguments, but people saw prices go up when they went to the grocery store. That was the fact that the Biden people didn’t succeed. Second thing was that people were looking for some kind of inspirational change and inspirational programs. Biden and Kamala Harris had a very difficult time trying to make their points.

The number of votes Trump got in this election were not that different from his performance in 2016. There is a narrow difference between the two, but it led to Trump being re-elected. That has to be seen as a failure as far as Democrats are concerned, because they didn’t really hold on to their base. They still won around 50% of the votes, but it wasn’t enough to win the election. Those two things—first, inflation, which people saw every day and was much on their minds; and second, instead of rejecting the Democrats and voting for Trump, what many of them did was simply not vote at all—really made a huge difference. I am sure there are lots of other explanations, but these are the two things that strike me as the obvious facts, as far as I’m concerned—the two principal things that led to the Democrats losing. We did discover that, essentially, the whole idea of Trump being a threat to democracy turned out to be an argument that fewer people cared about or were worried about, as compared to, for example, prices in the grocery store. One is theoretical, and the other is practical in daily life.

To be continued . . .

(The Conversation) – Is Iran poised for a succession in leadership? Well, that depends on what you read.

For weeks, rumors have been swirling about the health of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as a possible replacement. In late October 2024, the Jerusalem Post picked up a New York Times report that initially suggested the octogenarian leader, who has served in the role since 1989, was seriously ill. While the Times report was updated with a correction saying it had erroneously reported on what was known about his current health, it did say that a “quiet battle” had emerged over his succession, including that his second son, Mojtaba, could succeed him.

The rumor mill again kicked into overdrive in late November, with various media outlets, including those in Israel, suggesting that Khamenei had fallen into a coma and that the race was on to appoint his successor should he remain incapacitated or worse. Iranian sources quickly refuted the speculation.

Such conjecture is nothing new, with reports as far back as 2007 and more recently in 2022 pointing to the supreme leader’s purportedly ill health.

The truth of Khamenei’s health aside, the speculation points to an ever-present reality: The conflict between Iran on one side and Israel and the West on the other is not just about military might and threats – there is also an information battle being waged.

In that battle, the narrative of Khamenei’s poor health can be seen as a proxy for the health and stability of the Islamic Republic. One story has it that the Islamic Republic is unstable and just one major event away from wholesale change; the other, that the government in Tehran is well positioned to deal with both internal succession and external ideological foes.

The war of words

The speculation regarding Khamenei’s health comes amid a particularly tense moment in Israeli-Iranian relations. For the past year, the long-time foes have exchanged fiery rhetoric, which has been exacerbated by a series of escalatory events, including high-profile assassinations of Iran-alligned figures in Gaza, Lebanon and Tehran, and more lately direct military confrontation.

Throughout, both sides have utilized media and online platforms to push opposing official narratives that then find digital echo chambers.

Take the tit-for-tat missile strikes in October. Israel and Iran sought to downplay the impact of the respective strikes on their own territory by feeding media with statements suggesting little damage had been done.

At the same time, media sources from inside both nations were quick to suggest that the strikes had fulfilled their goals. Iranian media suggested Iranian missiles hit about 90% of Israeli targets; Israeli media countered that major Iranian nuclear research facilities had been hit and severely impaired Iran’s research capabilities.

“Competition,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic, IbisPaint, 2024

Such narratives are designed not only to send self-proclaimed messages of victory to the other side but also to appease domestic audiences. For Tehran, the messaging is intended to extend further, namely to regional partners – suggesting that Israel had been weakened by Iran’s attack and that Tehran still has their back.

Social media has played a key role in getting these counter messages across to a wider public. Since 2010, Iran has sought to distort the social media landscape through the establishment of pro-regime “sock puppets” that amplify pro-government propaganda. Former Iranian Intelligence Minister Heider Moslehi acknowledged back in 2011 that Tehran had made a large investment in “heavy information warfare.”

Meanwhile, Israel and other opponents of the Iranian government utilize online platforms to carry messages directly to the people of Iran, too. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah of Iran, have used YouTube and other platforms to encourage rebellion against the government in Tehran.

Iran has used similar digital channels, with veteran diplomat Mohammad Javad Zarif using the platform to highlight Iran’s culture and history and shared values with Jews, while at the same time slamming the Israeli government for its role in pushing the Trump administration to abandon the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

What does it all mean?

The exchange of missile strikes by Iran and Israel in October prompted widespread speculation among media outlets, politicians and diplomats that the region was on the brink of a full-scale conventional war.

Indeed, the rhetorical exchanges between Tehran and Tel Aviv include explicit threats of devastating retaliatory measures and warnings of significant escalation. Yet the cycle of reciprocal strikes has, to date, appeared to satisfy the strategic objectives of both sides’ military leadership.

And for now, the information and messaging war is again seemingly taking precedence over actual hot war.

After the last missile strike, carried out by Israel on Oct. 26, Iran stated that it retained the right to respond at a time and method of its choosing. But that, too, was perhaps an extension of the media narrative campaign.

Rather, the current situation suggests to me a deliberate and calculated strategy by both Iranian and Israeli forces to conserve their respective military resources, while attempting to achieve domestic and regional objectives via the information war.

For Israel, this means pushing the narrative that it has displayed the capability to reach critical Iranian infrastructure and sensitive security targets as desired. For Iran, it takes the form of saying it has reestablished sufficient deterrence against a stronger Israeli military.

Having escalated into direct military confrontation, the Iran-Israel conflict appears to have entered a new transitional phase.

Iranian state media continue to condemn Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon, while simultaneously issuing statements from senior military commanders reaffirming Tehran’s readiness to respond to perceived acts of aggression.

But for now, at least, warfare is being conducted via information and disinformation rather than through conventional military weapons.

Shirvin Zeinalzadeh, Graduate Teaching Associate, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( RFE/ RL ) – Iran and Saudi Arabia have been bitter rivals for decades, vying to lead competing branches of Islam and standing on opposing sides of conflicts in Syria and Yemen.

But Tehran and Riyadh have taken major steps to de-escalate tensions and boost cooperation, a move that appeared unthinkable until recently.

The rapprochement has coincided with growing fears of an all-out war in the Middle East, where U.S. ally Israel is engaged in wars against Iranian-backed groups in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

The detente process has intensified since Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election earlier this month. The president-elect has pledged to bring peace to the region.

“I don’t view this as a warming of relations but rather as a cautious detente,” said Talal Mohammad, associate fellow at the Britain-based Royal United Services Institute.

Reassuring Iran

The first signs of a thaw came in March 2023, when Iran and Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations after more than seven years following a surprise Chinese-brokered agreement.

But it was Israel’s invasion of Gaza in October 2023 — soon after the U.S.- and EU-designated Palestinian terrorist group Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel — that gave real impetus to Iran-Saudi rapprochement efforts.

Since the war erupted, Iran and Israel have traded direct aerial attacks for the first time. The tit-for-tat assaults have brought the region to the brink of a full-blown conflict.

Saudi Arabia is “concerned that these escalating tensions between Israel and Iran could spiral out of control and lead to a broader regional conflict that may impact their interests,” said Hamidreza Azizi, fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Azizi adds that Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shi’a-dominated Iran are still “far from friends,” despite the recent rapprochement, and they remain rivals vying for influence.

Over the past year, Saudi Arabia has stopped conducting air strikes in neighboring Yemen against the Iran-backed Huthi rebels. Riyadh has also made attempts to negotiate an end to the 10-year conflict pitting the Huthis against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

The Huthis have also ceased cross-border attacks on Saudi Arabia. In 2019, the rebels managed to shut down half of the kingdom’s oil production.

The Trump Factor

Trump’s victory in the November 5 presidential election has injected more urgency to the Iran-Saudi rapprochement, experts say.

Saudi Arabia’s top general, Fayyad al-Ruwaili, made a rare trip to Iran on November 10 to meet Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mohammad Baqeri in what Iranian media dubbed “defense diplomacy.”

The following day, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman accused Israel of committing “collective genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza and explicitly condemned Israel’s attack last month on Iranian military sites.

Azizi says there are fears in the region that Trump’s electoral victory will embolden Israel to intensify its attacks on Iran and Tehran’s interests.

During Trump’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021, his administration pursued a campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran that included imposing crippling sanctions against Tehran.

At the same time, Trump struck a close relationship with Riyadh. He helped facilitate normalization between several Arab states and Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords.

Before Israel launched its devastating war in Gaza, Saudi Arabia was reportedly on the verge of a historic deal to normalize relations with Israel.

Experts say that the Huthis’ attacks in 2019 on Saudi oil facilities convinced Riyadh that Washington will not come to its aid if it is attacked.

“Given Trump’s tendency toward unpredictable shifts in policy, Saudi Arabia may seek to play an influential role by encouraging Trump to adopt a balanced approach that ensures regional stability without triggering escalation with Iran,” Mohammad said.

“By subtly guiding U.S. policy toward calibrated sanctions rather than aggressive pressure, Saudi Arabia could help maintain regional security while avoiding the risks of open confrontation,” he added.

Israeli Normalization

Normalization talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel have been indefinitely postponed. Saudi officials have recently said that a deal was off until the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Mohammad says Riyadh has significant strategic incentives to normalize relations with Israel, including security and economic cooperation as well as access to U.S. nuclear and defense technology.

But analysts say Saudi Arabia will only resume talks when the Gaza war is over, given the current public sentiment in the Muslim world toward Israel.

“Normalizing relations without achieving tangible rights for Palestinians could weaken Saudi Arabia’s normative influence within the Islamic world — a position they are keen to maintain,” Azizi argued.

The Saudis will also have to take into account Iran, which staunchly opposes Saudi normalization with Israel.

“Riyadh may consult with Tehran and seek assurances that normalization with Israel would not heighten hostilities or undermine the balance achieved through recent diplomatic outreach to Iran,” Mohammad said.

Copyright (c)2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Iran-Saudi defence meeting: Generals discuss bilateral relations and cooperation”

RFE/ RL

The first constraint Israel faced was logistical. The Netanyahu government could not have its fighter jets fly straight to Iran, which would have allowed a more extensive set of attacks. Israel could not gain overflight permissions from Turkey, Iraq or any of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman). Sean Matthews at Middle East Eye points out that as a result, the Israelis would have had to fly down the Red Sea, go west across the Gulf of Aden, and approach Iran from the Arabian Sea. It is a long way around. They would have had to bring along large hulking refueling planes. This long, clumsy flight path limited what the Israelis could accomplish.

Extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier not ruled out hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil fields. Iran, however, essentially held the GCC countries hostage, warning that if US-backed Israel hit Iranian oil fields, Tehran would retaliate against US-backed Arab oil monarchies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration is trying to woo those countries into recognizing Israel, and having a berserker Israeli government draw them into hostilities with Iran would instead make these Arab countries flee both the US and the possible Israeli embrace. For some diplomatic purposes, as with detente with Iran, Saudi Arabia has already gone to China instead.

According to Middle East Eye, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had announced Tuesday that Iran had been promised by the Gulf Arabs that they would not allow their air space or soil to be used for Israeli attacks on Iran.

At the same time, Joe Biden pressured Israel not to attack Iranian nuclear facilities or oil fields.

I view Netanyahu as an adventurer who has been attempting to widen the war so as to force the Biden administration to support him. Although Iran backs Hamas, the CIA assessed that the ayatollahs had no idea Hamas was planning to carry out the October 7 attacks, and, indeed, that the Iranian leadership had declined to support Hamas during the past year precisely because they were furious that Yahya Sinwar had tried to drag them into a war without so much as consulting them. Iran also put pressure on Hezbollah not to provoke a war with Israel.

“Fighter Jet,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.

That is, though Iran certainly supports anti-Israel guerrilla groups in the region and enjoys harassing the Israelis through them and their rockets and drones, it doesn’t appear to have acted aggressively given the ferocity of Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza.

Netanyahu struck the Iranian embassy in Damascus last spring in an obvious attempt to bring Iran into the war, and Iran replied with a missile barrage that the US shot down.

Then this summer Netanyahu assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the civilian head of the Hamas Party politburo (which is not the same as the al-Qassam Brigades paramilitary). The assassination was carried out in Tehran, in a clear attempt to get Iran’s goat. Likewise, Netanyahu’s creepy pager booby trap attack on Hezbollah personnel (and some Iranians, such as the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon) and his assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in September were in part aimed at humiliating Iran.

Iran’s October 1 missile barrage at Israel was mostly shot down by the US, but some missiles got through and one hit an Israeli military base. This attack was revenge for the killings of Haniyeh and Nasrallah.

Israel’s riposte was so limited that it might well not elicit any response from Iran, drawing a line under this phase of the Israel-Iran conflict.

But Netanyahu was forced into a limited response by the Arab Gulf states (two of which –Bahrain and the Emirates– recognize Israel) and by the Biden administration. The refusal of overflight permissions by the GCC states also limited what Israel could accomplished with its F-35s.

I view Iran’s missile program as largely defensive. They have used it against Israel twice this year, and both came in response to Israeli provocations (provocations that I believe to be deliberate on Netanyahu’s part). Israel has made the point that its jets can now reach Iran with extensive refueling. Iran has made the point that a swarm of missile attacks can penetrate Israel’s missile defenses and hit an Israeli military base.

Each side is seeking some form of deterrence against the other, a deterrence that has broken down this year because of Israel’s aggression in Gaza and Lebanon and its anti-missile defenses.

I think Iran will be satisfied if it feels that a restoration of deterrence has been achieved. I don’t think Netanyahu is defending; I think he is attacking and attempting to expand his influence in the region. For that reason, it will be difficult to reestablish deterrence between the two countries.

For the moment, however, all-out war seems to have been averted.

I told him, but if Iran is attacked, Iranians will all suffer to no end.  

The lines spoken by that man have always stayed with me.  

For nearly four decades, Iranians have lived under oppression, tormented by corruption, mismanagement, and the burden of sanctions.  

Yet, I believe most Iranians do not want their county to be attacked much less destroyed. Yet, there are those who want regime change at any expense.

Perhaps some “L.A. types” or some monarchists are rooting for it.  In fact, in recent weeks, some in the Iranian diaspora have been calling for direct attack.   

As history shows, foreign intervention does not ensure the well-being of the citizens of those countries involved.

Look at Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.  Life is not better, nor is democracy in full swing in any of these countries. 

In 2006, the Bush administration allocated some $75 million for regime change in Iran.

Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the US would “actively confront” Iran and called for an extra $75 million to fund anti-Tehran propaganda and to support opposition groups inside and outside the country.

  There were many willing Iranians who accepted funds and worked towards that goal.  NGOs too were involved in this initiative, among them the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Tavana, Freedom House, Iran Wire and various others in and around the Beltway. 

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) received a good chunk, close to a million dollars.   A few Iranian “analysts” were and are working for this entity. 

“Azadi Tower under Attack,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

In 2007, John Mearsheimer, the Chicago professor who co-authored a book on the Israeli lobby, described FDD as part of the Israel lobby in the United States.  

In addition to making money out of the “regime change” gravy train, there are also those who seek money by suing the Islamic Republic.  Many names come to mind, even some progressive Iranians.  

According to Mr. Hooman Fakhimi, a lawyer in California who has tirelessly investigated these lawsuits.  Nearly 200 billion dollars has been filed in judgement against the Islamic Republic in various courts by individuals and organizations from victims of 9/11 (!) to those whose families were directly or indirectly harmed.  Many of these lawsuits are spurious.  Even Ukrainian nationals have entered the fray, presumably because Iran has sold drones to the Russians in its war on Ukraine.   

Mr. Fakhimi acknowledges that if all these lawsuits succeed, “It could bankrupt Iran.” 

The Israeli regime under the war-monger Netanyahu has been itching for a war with Iran for years. Remember him showing maps and graphs at the UN every year?

Additionally, most mainstream U.S. media,  mainly CNN and MSNBC warn us daily of an upcoming surprise attack on Iran.

It is as if we are watching a war game on play station.  But this is no child play.  It is the real thing as we witness the human tragedy unfolding in Gaza and Lebanon.

Is Iran next?

As an IDF spokesman said recently, “Iran is next.”

Israel has destroyed Gaza and is now in the process of destroying Lebanon.  The excuse is Hamas and Hezbollah. Many in the Israeli government are now openly spewing the idea of annexing and appropriating the occupied West Bank, the Gaza strip and parts of Lebanon. 

War is always destructive.   Look at Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon.

Far from bringing about regime change, an attack on Iran will only strengthen the current rulers in power.