President Ahmadinejad presided today over a staged tightly controlled celebration of the 31st anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He gloated about the miniscule amount of enriched uranium that miraculously appeared following Monday’s announcement of increasing the level of current production to 20 percent. An MSNBC report, “Iran is now a Nuclear State” noted:Ahmadinejad reiterated to hundreds of thousands of cheering Iranians on the anniversary of the 1979 foundation of the Islamic Republic that the country was now a "nuclear state," an announcement he's made before. He insisted that Iran had no intention of building nuclear weapons.
"I want to announce with a loud voice here that the first package of 20 percent fuel was produced and provided to the scientists," he said.
"We have the capability to enrich uranium more than 20 percent or 80 percent but we don't enrich (to this level) because we don't need it," he said in a speech broadcast live on state television.
Was that the ‘big punch’ that Ayatollah Khamenei said last weekend would occur today in Tehran? Hardly.
The “big punch” was not against the West and ‘Zionist entity,’ Israel; it was against the Iranian people. That was the bottom line of comments by Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) executive director,Mark Dubowitz, and Dr. Michael Ledeen, FDD Freedom Scholar, during a 1330AMWEBY radio panel discussion on the Middle East, Iran, Israel and Washington – listen to the entire program.
The ‘big punch’ was against the Iranian Green Movement opposition, led by failed Presidential candidates, former Iran –Iraq War PM Mir-Hossein Mousavi, i and former Chairman of the Iranian Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi. That was evident in the crushing assault on the opposition by regime Basiji para-military and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps security forces in Tehran. Conspicuous by their absence was the Iranian military suspected by the Mullahs of harboring opposition sentiment. Note this Times on-line report,” Iran Crushes opposition protests with violence.”
Iran’s regime thwarted the opposition’s hopes of turning the 31st anniversary celebrations of the Islamic revolution into another massive protest today.
It out-maneuvered the so-called Green movement by swamping the official proceedings with huge numbers of its own supporters, preventing the media from covering anything else and blanketing the rest of the capital with security forces who forcefully suppressed the opposition’s relatively muted demonstrations
Opposition websites claimed a young woman named Leila Zareii was killed and many others were wounded or arrested. The opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammed Khatami - a former president - were attacked, as was Zahra Rahnavard, wife of the Green Movement’s other leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Even Zahra Eshraghi, granddaughter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution, was briefly arrested. She and her brother, Hassan, are both opposition sympathizers and she is married to Mr. Khatami’s brother.
“It's pretty clear that Greens everywhere will feel demoralized... The overall feeling is one of disappointment,” one well-placed source in Tehran told The Times last night. “The opposition miscalculated,” said another.
The regime was determined to prevent the so-called Green Movement from hijacking the biggest day in Iran’s calendar and largely succeeded.
Opposition websites said Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militiamen were stationed everywhere and that they moved swiftly and violently to break up opposition demonstrations.
They claimed the security forces used live ammunition, knives, tear gas and paintballs that would enable them to identify protesters later and that they were beating and arresting women as well as men. They were backed up by water cannon, new Chinese anti-riot vehicles and helicopters. Some, wearing plain clothes, infiltrated the protesters. The mobile telephone, internet and text messaging systems were seriously disrupted.
Mr. Karroubi’s son, Hussein, said his father had to get out of his car and walk towards Sadeghieh Square, where thousands of supporters had gathered, because the roads were blocked. He was joined by other protestors, but they found their way blocked by plainclothes security forces that attacked them with knives, batons and tear gas.
The Islamic regime also played a tougher game of digital ‘whack a mole’, as they blockaded internet traffic and communications by opposition protesters. The irony is that the cyber war against the Iranian opposition was carried out using technology purchased from Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia.
Dubowitz of the FDD commented during the WEBY radio panel discussion that the US had to take the lead in imposing what Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren in a PJTV interview called “crippling sanctions.” Dubowitz, who had briefed Congressional leaders during the legislative effort that resulted in both the House and Senate passage of stronger sanctions, noted what he considered one of the most effective proposals: a virtual quarantine on refined petroleum products exported to Iran. According to Dubowitz, the long-overdue Iranian refined petroleum products sanctions zero in on a major economic vulnerability: the Islamic regime has to import more than 40 percent of gasoline and diesel products because of the lack of capital to build refineries. While directly impacting the man on the street in Tehran through rationing and dramatic inflationary price increases, Dubowitz believes that the refined petroleum products sanction would result in heightened Iranian opposition to the Islamic regime for impoverishing its citizens and mismanaging the economy. Dubowitz believes that the Obama version of tough sanctions is reflected in a Treasury Department announcement yesterday of a freeze of financial assets here in the US which allegedly belong to Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials. Many believe such efforts are fruitless given the movement of those assets to Dubai and other unregulated foreign financial venues. When queried by WEBY co-hosts Bates and Gordon about the likelihood of Russian accommodations of tougher sanctions, Dubowitz responded that Russia might be more supportive now that Iran has announced the snubbing of the ‘5+1’ nuclear enrichment program exchange in which Russia had an economic interest. China would, in his opinion, be unlikely to support sanctions given its worldwide scramble for resource deals to keep its economy developing.
Ledeen noted that according to a report in the Suddeutsch Zeitung based on an IAEA report, a Russian scientist indicated that Iran had developed a nuclear warhead that might be mounted on a medium range Shahab III missile, if miniaturized. If that occurred, the threat to Israel and the Middle East would be palpable. Note this comment from a Ledeen Pajamas Media blog post:
Quoting a new IAEA summary, the Suddeutsche said the scientist had previously worked in a Soviet nuclear weapons laboratory on advanced warheads. It said both western intelligence services and diplomats had confirmed the connection.
The newspaper added that Iran was trying to make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit into one of its Shahab 3 medium-range missiles and was designing a so-called two-point implosion system, which requires only two simultaneously exploding detonators to trigger a nuclear blast.
The former Soviet scientist was an expert on the high-speed cameras needed to test if both detonations were symmetrical, and had worked for Iran from the mid-1990s till 2000.
When asked whether that would give rise to US, and especially Israeli concerns leading to possible military actions, Ledeen suggested that the US for over a decade had neglected support for Iranian opposition. That in his opinion was in sharp contrast to the support provided directly and covertly by the Reagan Administration to Solidarity that assisted in overturning the Polish Communist regime in the 1980’s. How that would apply by analogy to the apocalyptic Shia Mullahs in Tehran is another matter. Ledeen referenced the so-called VOICE Act passed by Congress and signed into law by the Obama Administration that would supply satellite phones and other internet communications links to the opposition in Iran thereby avoiding controls exerted by the Islamic regime. This he contended was analogous to the supply by the US of fax machines to Solidarity in Poland.
When asked by WEBY co-hosts Bates and Gordon, what kind of a regime might follow in the wake of a possible downfall of the Islamic Republic in Iran, Dubowitz and Ledeen opined that it might not be everything we would want, it may very well be messy, but at least it is better than the alternative.
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