Charlie Rose

Abadani  03/15/2011 01:40 AM Report

I am half way through the book. It is well researched and unbiased work. Although I do not agree on everything, I recognise that this book is essential in providing a lot of facts about The Shah and the recent Iranian History. As an Iranian it is also very frustrating to see the esxtent of The Iranian's elite's shortsitedness and selfishness that eventually resulted in the current situation.

robdverity  03/08/2011 04:12 PM Report

yes

NeilMacCallister  03/08/2011 03:06 PM Report

Rob? ..Is it your argument that the League of Nations (1922) and The United Nations General Assembly (1947) were incorrect in their decisions to establish the home and state (respectively) of Israel?

If you could get in a time machine, and go back to that century, what would you have done?

Do you agree with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that those world decisions ought to be ignored, and that Israel needs to be destroyed?

As for "equanimity", what nations or peoples have the Israelis sworn to destroy? (..an act so familiar to the current Iranian rulers)

Are the personal frustrations of this student-radical now in charge in Iran, and hoping to someday challenge the world with a nuclear weapon, really worth the lives of millions of people?

Perhaps his dreams of "blitzkrieg" are being fast-tracked now that the ITER and DOMA fusion reactors are (..too slowly!!!) making progress toward removing the world's need for his oil, and therefore reducing the source of his wealth and power?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ought to address today's world, and turn his country's excellent scientists away from being bomb producers and toward being producers of fusion-generated electricity.

If his nation were the first to arrive there, ..then he would (.."at last!!") truly rule the world economy!

May God help him choose correctly.

robdverity  03/06/2011 04:02 PM Report

Some might posit that our support of (nuclear) Israel and their respondent oppression of Pals. has had a more deleterious effect on world equanimity - long before Iran (as a reaction) became ambitious as well.

NeilMacCallister  03/06/2011 03:11 AM Report

Dear Observer,

May I suggest that it not the most important concern of most Americans that any Iranian voting exercise be a model of ideal democracy, nor whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Iran's President. What concerns Americans is the nuclear-weapons aspirations of its current administration, regardless of that administration's name, religion, or economic background.

Nuclear war has consequences. When Iran finally brings to completion its development and testing of nuclear warheads and delivery devices, it will be standing on the brink of a war that could demolish the entirety of its people.

That being the case, many people of the world do have a humanitarian right to wonder if this on-going march toward warfare is in fact the "free and willfully accepted" choice made by an actual majority of the Iranian people.

Is it? ..or is the current Iranian ruler pursuing a consequence to which the majority of the Iranian people have not agreed?

That is the concern most important to Americans.

REMant  03/04/2011 01:11 PM Report

A timely subject, and probably the correct interpretation of that time, despite Charlie's apparent lack of interest in it except for propaganda. But I don't think Khomeini hijacked much. His views were fairly well known. We just don't see any other kind of government but ours, which was the Shah's primary offense. Khomeini's defense of Plato alone, for instance, would make him automatically the enemy of Britain and America. If we expect peace, we have to come to some sort of appreciation of their views for a start. I won't say, however, that they haven't overstepped the bounds of the faith, themselves.

A palace guard, revolutionary council or a dominant political party always ends up owning everything. It has happened numerous times. Aside from the questionable justice of the process, I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing for the balance of a constitution, provided the other two pillars can exert themselves. "All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as long as we are slinging phrases around.

The president's most recent expostulations seem as cynical as those against Mubarak, tho Qaddafi seems a safer target, never mind that no one has yet proved the Libyan AF is bombing either civilians, or the "rebels," as the BBC now calls them, and that both sides have already condemned potential Western involvement. I don't think it wise to intervene unless the situation becomes such that intervention would be appreciated for what it was.

We might ask ourselves, suppose half the American states, mostly rural areas controlling a rich resource, having had enough of subjugation by the manufacturing and financial sections, wanted to set up their own govt to trade freely with the rest of the world. Would Washington champion that as heartily, or would it embargo, sanction, and invade them with a conscripted army paid with bogus money, eventually encouraging revolts by the citizenry in the name of democracy? Well, we know the answer to that, actually... The irony was, of course, that when those citizens looked for acceptance among the winners they found no more than from whence they had come.

OBSERVER  03/04/2011 12:58 PM Report

Dear Mr.Millani, we lived in Iran in the past 70 years, witnessed it all, unlike you!!!, and , wonder how a Person like you, who makes stories of his own, can be paid by Stanford University!, and, US Administration!!to present these junks!!! You started your book a few years ago, during your friendship with MULLAH KHATAMI. The core of your book was to emphesize the END of Monarchy in Iran; the weakness of the LAST!!! SHAH!!Never expected the door may revolve like THIS! Shah was a very educated, modern, and Nationalist man. Mosadegh was his PRIME MINISTER. What a story you make about their relation is beyond logic. The followers of MULLAH KHATAMI, are simply fanatics dressed in HOLLYWOOD OUTFITS. See the following:

The Back Story on Iran Clashes:

Iranian parliamentarians presented an ugly scene on Tuesday with raucous chants calling for the executions of two opposition leaders – and the U.S. news media was quick to denounce the Iranian government – but there is a complex history that Americans aren’t getting.

Who, after all, are former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and former House Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, the two opposition leaders who continue to insist that the 2009 election giving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term was rigged or stolen? Are Mousavi and Karrubi the noble “democrats” as they are portrayed in the U.S. press or are they brazen political operatives seeking to claim through disruption in the streets what they could not achieve at the ballot box? As disturbing as the scene in the Iranian parliament was, are there explanations for this unappealing fury?

And what about the U.S. news media, from Left to Right? Are American journalists displaying their bias against Ahmadinejad in a replay of their behavior before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when many liberal commentators supported the war against the “evil” Saddam Hussein?

In a February 2003 article entitled “The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,” Bill Keller, the current executive editor of the New York Times, boasted that his pro-invasion contingent included “op-ed regulars at this newspaper [the New York Times] and The Washington Post, the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek.”

With such a star-studded supporting cast, is it any wonder why President George W. Bush thought he could launch an invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, a war of choice that would leave hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and millions injured or dispossessed?

So, before another dangerous propaganda bandwagon gets rolling – with Keller now joined by MSNBC’s “progressive” voices like Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews – perhaps some context is in order.

First, it is long past time to admit that – whether Americans like it or not – the unsavory Ahmadinejad won the 2009 election. Yes, the Iranian electoral system is badly flawed, with Islamic religious leaders restricting voter choices.While the loutish Ahmadinejad is understandably disdained by the West and by many of Iran’s better-educated voters, he retains a strong following among the nation’s poor and the religious conservatives whose votes apparently reelected him by a substantial margin.

Election Studies

=====================

Though widely ignored by the major American news media, a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found little evidence to support allegations of fraud or to conclude that most Iranians view Ahmadinejad as illegitimate.

PIPA analyzed multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different sources, including some before the June 12, 2009, election and some afterwards. The study found that in all the polls, a majority said they planned to vote for Ahmadinejad or had voted for him. The numbers ranged from 52 to 57 percent just before the election to 55 to 66 percent after the election.

"These findings do not prove that there were no irregularities in the election process,” said Steven Kull, director of PIPA. “But they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad."

An analysis by former U.S. national security officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett reached a similar conclusion. They found that the “personal political agendas” of American commentators caused them to side with the anti-Ahmadinejad protesters who sought to overturn the election results. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How US Media Botched Iran’s Election.”]

Among those biased American journalists on assignment in Iran in 2009 was Times executive editor Keller, one of the liberal “hawks” on Iraq. He coauthored a “news analysis” that opened with an old joke about Ahmadinejad looking into a mirror and saying “male lice to the right, female lice to the left,” disparaging both his Islamic conservatism and his rise from the street.

[Keller recently used the New York Times magazine to disparage WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, as ex-FBI official Coleen Rowley has noted.]

The reason why Ahmadinejad apparently did win the 2009 election was that his support was concentrated among the urban and rural poor who benefited from government food giveaways and jobs programs and who tend to listen more to conservative clerics in the mosques.

Mousavi, who came in second in the election, seemed to acknowledge this point when he released his supposed proof of the rigged election, accusing Ahmadinejad of buying votes by providing food and higher wages for the poor. At some Mousavi rallies, his supporters reportedly would chant “death to the potatoes!” in a joking reference to Ahmadinejad’s food distributions.

Yet, while passing out food and raising pay may be a sign of “machine politics,” such tactics are not normally associated with election fraud. In the United States, they are usually called the “power of incumbency.”

Generally speaking, Mousavi had the backing of the urban middle class and the well-educated, especially in the more cosmopolitan capital of Tehran where universities became a center for protests against Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad’s policies – and his offensive comments about the Holocaust – have created hardships for this voting bloc, which has found it hard to travel and do business in the face of Western sanctions and restrictions.

Beyond repudiating Ahmadinejad’s obnoxious behavior, reducing the power of the mullahs may be a worthy goal, too. Having spent time in Iran in the early 1990s and witnessing the constraints on women’s rights, I personally share that sentiment. But it is hypocritical for U.S. pundits to talk about protests seeking to overturn the choice of a voting majority as “pro-democracy.”