This is an update of the earlier post and comments about the the absurd Treasury regulations effectively banning works by authors from countries under US sanctions (e.g. Iran, Cuba, Sudan) from being published in the US. The regulations are being challenged in US court by Nobel Prize winner and Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi.

This article in the Seattle Times from Dec 8 provides fuller info and some clarification. Apparently it is possible to obtain an exemption via one's literary agent and publisher applying for a license to engage in the business of turning a manuscript into a published work. So in that sense, the regulations aren't quite as draconian as they initially appeared, although we are dealing with licensing speech, which is generally frowned upon in US law (she says in her mildest understatement).

According to the article, however, the situation is almost worse than originally presented. Treasury has for all intents and purposes overruled a legislative provision enacted several years ago to exempt publications from the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act. The system Treasury has come up with sounds like a catch-22 for political dissidents worthy of both Yosarian and the Red Queen. (HT folkbum at LiberalStreetFighter.com)

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Not an update exactly. But related.

The position of the US government on Iranian authors is especially repugnant in light of the situation in which dissident authors, especially journalists, are finding themselves today in Iran. US attempts to isolate the regime through restricting flow of information and ideas are unlikely to have any effect on the mullahs, will deny Americans the ability to understand and support those opposing the regime, and as often as not wind up limiting our ability to help them.

Iranian woman journalist freed on bail, hospitalised

TEHERAN (AFP) Dec 11 An Iranian woman arrested in a judicial crackdown on reformist journalists was freed on bail but needed hospital treatment due to her detention, her husband told AFP on Saturday.

According to Ahmad Beigloo, journalist Fereshteh Ghazi “was kept in solitary confinement for 38 days and had to be checked into hospital as she was not in a good physical or mental shape”.

The woman was arrested over her articles on women’s rights published on Internet sites. She was released on bail of 500 million rials (about 57,000 dollars).

In recent months, Iran’s hardline judiciary has arrested a number of pro-reform journalists accused of publishing propaganda against the regime, acting against national security, disturbing public opinion and insulting religious sanctities.

Four jailed reformist journalists, three of them recently released, have written letters of repentance, saying they were ”brainwashed” by foreigners and “counter-revolutionaries”.

Two weeks ago the European Union lodged a formal protest with Iranian authorities over the arrest and harassment of journalists, staff of non-governmental organizations and members of religious minorities.

To follow up on the "confessions," from AFP Dec 14:

Iran’s reformist government admitted yesterday that it was concerned over how the hardline judiciary managed to exact written apologies and confessions from several detained dissident journalists.

“People making statements that go against their convictions cannot win the confidence of public opinion and raise questions,” government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told journalists.

Just because the neanderthal judiciary and their goons are beneath despicable doesn't mean we should punish Iranian authors. Nor, I should add, is it causus belli for going to war against those same neanderthals.

Browsing around the internets, I came across RAND's page of commentary on Iran. Just scanning the headlines is kind of funny, in a not-so-funny kind of way:

In Iran, the U.S. Can't Stay on the Sidelines — Dec. 02, 2004

Nuclear Accord Could Open Door To Re-engagement With Tehran — Nov. 19, 2004

Talk It Out on Iran Before It's Too Late — Aug. 27, 2004

Engage, Don't Isolate, Iran — June 27, 2004

Time to Deal With Iran — May 6, 2004

Waste your breath much, RAND?

Today was another missed opportunity: for the 20th year in a row, the U.S. rejected Iran's bid to enter the WTO. The irony, of course, is that the new ideas and rule sets (Westoxification!) that come with WTO accession are what Iran's corrupt, repressive ruling mullahs fear most. They won't be able to handle the rate of rapid social change that will come along. Opening up Iran's closed society is how you get the regime change clock ticking faster. But instead of presenting a united front with Europe on the nuclear question, while loudly offering Iran a chance to connect up to the world community, we're inadvertantly strengthening hardline groups like the IRGC while foolishly pinning our hopes on a disorganized gaggle of royalist exiles, Marxists, and the same crowd that duped us for missiles in the 80s, it seems.

Alas.

[UPDATE 12-12-04} To avoid any confusion about the Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge, described below, the name of the team headed by WindsofChange.NET has been changed from A Mighty Wind to Pajamahdeen -- see Joe Katzman's update on the Challenge.

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[UPDATE 12-11-04]


Happenings at Harvard
(Continued from yesterday's proceedings, see below) Here's Hoder at Harvard, courtesy Jeff Jarvis, and more Iraq the Model guys (including visit to the White House), scroll up and down. Armed Liberal is there too, and promises further comments.

Machine translation
Tim Oren (WindsofChange.NET & Due Diligence) is also at the Beekman Center conference this weekend. He has posted a piece on WofC that summarizes points he was making in one of the sessions about machine translation, and the prospects of it realizing its promise and becoming widely available as a high-quality service in the not too distant future. As a VC, he has a decidedly hard-nosed approach, yet also an enthusiastic one about the potential. From just the narrow view of the blogosphere, clearly of immense importance for international blogging.

Tim has previoiusly written about his concept of "the age of citizens' diplomacy" on WofC.

The numbers involved are still small. There are plenty of trolls, nay sayers, and hate-mongers intermingled with the goodwill. There are language barriers on all sides. There are adversaries using the same medium to organize destruction. And this will not reach truly disconnected countries, from North Korea to Sudan.

Yet, every sign points in the direction of growth, from the increasing reach of the Internet, the spread of cheap mobile media devices, to the growing desire to bypass the legacy media and find out for ourselves. And people are starting to act based on their contacts, from influencing votes to mobilizing relief organizations such as Spirit of America.

Venture capitalists like myself keep an eye out for learning curves, things growing fast and out of control. The military looks for fast decision (OODA) loops, systems that adapt faster than their competitors. Citizens' diplomacy scores on both counts. That was the point of dragging in [earlier in the post] the Smith-Mundt Act and the Dept. of State : These are representative of the government's adaptation rate in the world of foreign affairs and media. There are folks in the DOD who recognize the problem (large PDF file) and are pushing for change. I wish them well, but bureaucratic history is not on their side.

So where do we go? The title gives it away - I think you're looking at the medium that will forge a large part of the outcome. We are all ambassadors now, Americans and others alike. Just as we're bypassing mainstream media, we've started to bypass mainstream diplomacy. What we do and say with one another may matter a great deal - just a small matter of war or peace (not to put on any pressure).

Donations to develop an Arabic blogging tool -- Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge
As a small gesture toward making that sort of grassroots conversation happen, Tim's also contributing to a project (described by praktike in an earlier post) that will develop an easy-to-use arabic blogging tool, and provide free hosting services. The project is called Viral Freedom, sponsored by Spirit of America.

Winds of Change is heading a team of blogs in the Spirit of America Friends of Iraq blogger challenge. The donations made in the name of the "A Mighty Wind" team are earmarked for the Viral Freedom arabic blogging tool. Here's more of the scoop on the project from a snip of a much longer Jeff Jarvis post. He's joined forces with the Mighty Wind team.

Not long after I first discovered Hoder and the Iranian weblog revolution, I wished for blogging in Iraq and Zeyad emailed me and then started HealingIraq. He introduced blogging to others, and that led to IraqTheModel, among others. They have made a difference, helping us all see Iraq from the perspective of citizens and building bridges with us. But they blog in English.

To bring the full power of citizens' media to a people, it has to be available in their native language. Zeyad recently emailed me again and said he's getting ready to blog in Arabic. That will be even more important. The folks at SixApart have generously volunteered to help him with a bilingual blog. I just got email saying that Blogger is going to help him figure it out. The new Spirit of America tool is being built by iUpload (full disclosure: we're working with them at Advance Internet). The more the merrier.

Hoder helped people in Iran blog in Persian by giving them instruction in using the English-language Blogger. How much better it will be when he and Zeyad and the IraqTheModel brothers can spread the power of this new people's medium in their native languages.

Praktike has already given as have I, and the button in the sidebar will take you to the Mighty Wind's team donation page. You can also give in the name of other blogs or teams or navigate to another one of Spirit of America's projects. Bloggers who would like to add their blog to the Mighty Wind team can click here.

The Friends of Iraq Blogger Challenge ends Dec 15, so you don't have many more days if you want your donation to count toward the competition.

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Original post 12-10-04: Jeff Jarvis is blogging the Internet & Society event at Harvard's Berkman Center today. (Too lazy to copy all of Jeff's links -- go see the original)

Harvard: The world meets

There will come a moment today when the world meets in Cambridge as the pioneers of citizens' media come together: Hoder is in America (at long last!). Maylasian blogger Jeff Ooi is here. Oh Yeon-ho, the founder of OhMyNews, the people's news service that is changing South Korea, is talking. Omar and Mohamed from IraqTheModel are coming this afternoon. Add to that Ethan Zuckerman and his work in Africa and Joi Ito and his work around the globe and all the Americans and you have all the veggies you need for one helluva great global succotash.

Here's his blogging what Hoder had to say.

And here's his story of meeting up with the Iraq the Model guys in DC earlier this week.

How in the world, before this, could I ever have become friends with two men on the other side of the world in a war zone where our soldiers are fighting? How could I have learned about their lives in the midst of that battlefield? How could we have made mutual friends -- Zeyad, Kerry Dupont, Jim Hake? How could such a group have ended up working together, though thousands of miles apart, on a project to bring this new medium to the rest of the world? (Omar translated the Arabic blogging tool, by the way.)

I stand in awe of all that. But I also stand in awe of these two men. They have tremendous courage doing what they are doing: They grab onto free speech like men dying of thirst who finally come upon the oasis. They use their free speech with a gusto we should all admire and aspire to. They use it improve their nation and their future.

And it does take courage to do what they do. There are terrorists lurking around the corner of every word today. But these brothers keep doing what they are doing. And they come here to share their story with us. They are meeting with reporters and with others.

BTW, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been worrying about the lengthening silence of Zeyad (Healing Iraq). Last we heard from him (Nov 20), his neighborhood had been turned into a full-blown combat zone. He's just reappeared, with apologies for those concerned about his well-being. He'd been in Basra and has just returned.

This isn't a life and death matter, but it does illustrate the absurd traps our legislation or regulations often set for our foreign policy when we try to address one issue and end up producing other problems. Somewhere there ought to be an administrative proceeding for the State Department or other agencies to administer exemptions from blanket prohibitions. The problem has received increasing attention in the area of visas and foreign students, where our more stringent recent policies are being applied in a fashion that undermines all too frequently the strong economic, political and cultural interests America has in openness.

For a society that prides itself especially on openness to ideas and freedom of speech, this episode is postively perverse. It was described originally in the Christian Science Monitor by Farzaneh Milani, a native of Iranian who is director of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia.

Shirin Ebadi - a human rights lawyer and one of Iran's first women judges - is however, forbidden to publish her memoirs in the United States because of a trade embargo against three countries: Sudan, Cuba and Iran. Coming from a land that has no exact equivalent for the term "to sue," the 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate is suing the American government. Challenging the regulations imposed by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ebadi calls the ban "a critical missed opportunity both for Americans to learn more about my country and its people from a variety of Iranian voices, and for a better understanding to be achieved between our two countries."

Ebadi has a point. Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of new titles made available to the American reading public every year are translated works. Furthermore, with no official relations with the Iranian government, with new prohibitions on direct access to the people, with travel and tourism virtually stopped, it is hard for Americans to see Iran beyond the headlines. Misunderstandings and misperceptions are rampant.

In spite of its long history of cooperation and friendship with the U.S., which was interrupted by the 1979 revolution, especially the hostage crisis, Iran is represented as an intractable enemy. Its dominant image now is that of a country-turned-jailer; a country taking Americans, no less diplomats and emissaries, hostage.
[...]
For well over a century, women have been a moderating, modernizing force in Iran with Shirin Ebadi as one of its most articulate and successful representatives. Her voice, like Sheherazade's, is a beacon of hope and temperance. It should not be silenced. It ought to be heard.

Our friend the Brooding Persian would agree with the importance of women to Iran's ancient past and future, with a somewhat different take in his recent post "Warrior Woman."

And the past generally helps put present in perspective. I mean, who can really be surprised by the existence of warrior women knowing what woman in Iran have done and continue to do every day. It must be in the genes!

As I have said before,... Iranian women are poised to take the helm of this nation in a dazzling sort of way. They are the one consistently belligerent group incessantly challenging boundaries and refusing to be cowered.

The Persian's post is full of great links to materials about Iranian women both past and present. I was especially taken by his recommendation of the author of a forthcoming book dealing with gender and modernity in Iran, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards : Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, by Afsaneh Najmabadi.

The issue of identity and modernity, and the gender dimension of identity , is a recurring theme in a number of publications about Iran. Another book to be published early in 2005 is reviewed in Beirut's Daily Star. Portrait Photographs from Isfahan : Faces in Transition, 1920-1950 is a collection of several hundred photographs from the period, assembled by Iranian artist, academic and activist Parisa Damandan.

[The book] focuses on a tight but tumultuous time frame, when Iran was undergoing rapid social, political and economic transformation. Damandan, who was born in Isfahan and remembers her own early experiments with having her picture taken by a professional photographer, returned to her hometown to find evidence of the old studios and commercial practices that once flourished in the ancient city.

The book resulting from her research reveals as much about how photographers worked in the first half of the 20th century as it does about how people in those times saw themselves, how they constructed their identities before the camera and, in turn, how the identity of a nation took shape, fell apart and reformed against a backdrop of industrialization, modernity, political change and looming revolution and upheaval.
[...]
[In addition to telling the story of individual photographers] Damandan adds the story of a city, a country and a people. The book is full of surprises - cross-dressing women, Isfahan's community of Russian prostitutes and the flood of Polish refugees who took up temporary residence in Iran during World War II. And it captures telling evidence of changing times - women casting off and taking up the veil, the significance of gymnasiums as a social space in men's lives, family configurations, gender roles at social events and the growth of industry (textile factories, workers on strike) that is evident both on the landscape and in the photographs themselves.

In addition to Damandan's narrative, "Portrait Photographs from Isfahan" includes essays by Iranian writer Reza Sheikh (who looks at the relationship between portraiture and democracy) and Dutch writer Josephine van Bennekom (who explores the differences between and encounters among Iranian and European portraiture).
[...]

As an interesting aside, the Persian has also been concerned about the problem of Iranian writings being blocked from publication in the US. In this case, the focus was on poetry.

Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all that the next Secretary of State is an old Kremlinoligist. November has been an active month for Russia-watching, some good news, some not so good news.

Main areas of interest in this clippings collection:

1. A second term for President Bush -- views from Moscow
2. Black Gold - Russia has more... and then some
3. The evolving structure of Russia's political economy, and the dilemma of low growth and investment outside the energy sector
4. The CIS and the Near-Abroad -- Russia's posture in its sphere of influence, and the West's responses
5. NATO -- areas of collaboration and friction
6. Nuclear weapons and treaties
7. Chechnya

   more »

then think how much a map can tell. Sometimes it's helpful to put oneself in the position of others whose behavior you would like to influence -- even if they are implacable foes.

Surely the Times best-sellers on business strategy agree that somewhere in the top 5 "to-do" list is "know the competition." So mightn't you feel a bit antsy if you were sitting in Tehran?

Courtesy Needlenose.

[UPDATE 11-25-04] The Brooding Persian points us to this useful perspective, provided by the next National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley:

Even critics must acknowledge that the security arrangements developed after World War II, largely dependent upon nuclear weapons, were successful in giving us a Europe that has been free for fifty years from the major warfare that twice afflicted the continent in the first half of this century. Under the protection of nuclear deterrence, Europe has pursued a policy of economic and political integration that has put to rest age-old antagonisms and centuries of conflict between countries such as France and Germany. Nuclear deterrence also helped to hold off a Communist Soviet Union until the internal contradictions of that regime brought it down. In summary, "morality" must be judged in part by its effects, and if judged by these results, nuclear deterrence was a highly moral and responsible national security policy.

I generally enjoy the prose stylings of Atrios, James Wolcott, Kevin Drum, and even Steve Gilliard on occasion.

But, like Matthew Yglesias, I think they really ought to keep their opinions to themselves until they've actually read The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Betweeen Iran and America. Having just finished the book, I think it's wrong to suggest that Pollack has simply gone through The Threatening Storm replacing q's with n's. If anything, the book is meant to forestall a foolish course of action such as a military invasion (he's got a section aptly named "The Case Against Invading Iran") or a covert regime destabilization campaign (there's another section called "The Ghost of Kim Roosevelt").

Pollack's nuanced case is duly replete with qualifiers and caveats, but the bottom line is that, as "our least bad option," he favors a "Triple Track" approach consisting of the following elements:

• Hold Open the Prospect of the Grand Bargain
  
• A True Carrot-and-Stick Approach
  
• Preparing for a New Containment Regime
  

He says on p. 385:

[J]ust because the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons does not quite justify the extraordinary price of an invasion does not mean that it is not a threat or that it would not justify other actions by the United States that might not be as costly as an invasion but could still require considerable sacrifices. Foreign policy is rarely an all-or-nothing activity--that either a threat is great enough to justify paying any price, including invasion or nuclear strikes, or else it is not a threat at all and therefore does not justify paying any price. Most foreign policy problems fall somewhere in between, and the Iranian nuclear threat still falls toward the higher end of the spectrum.

Failing to succeed would meaning learning to live with a nuclear Iran, which would be pretty bad but not the end of the world.

I should warn potential readers that the book is quite sloppy in parts, probably the result of a headlong rush to publication. Pollack often appears to directly contradict himself within the same paragraph.

For instance, on p. 16, amid a discussion of 19th century Iranian history:

Entire Iranian industries were thus wiped out by foreign competition, impoverishing Persia's middle class and artisanry. At various points, European creditors pressed the shah to sell off Crown lands to repay debts, increasing the power of the landlords at the expense of the central government and further diminishing royal revenues in the future. Moreover, these new duties brought the shahs increasingly into competition with Iran's rising middle class, composed largely of merchants and business (called bazaaris because their place of business was the bazaar, meaning "market" in Persian) who were being penalized for the government's financial mistakes. (my bolding)

Try making sense of that.

That's only a minor example of Pollack's discombobulating prose-- the big picture is equally muddled. Iran has been mostly helpful in Iran and Iraq, he says, but Iran has reverted to its bad old ways from the 1990s. Khatami has lost his mojo and the hardliners from that time period are back in charge, but the current regime "does not have a history of reckless behavior." It's been nearly impossible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with punishing Iran for its bad behavior, but it will be possible to get the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese to go along with a multilateral sanctions regime. Strangely, there's no mention of Iranian support for Muqtada Sadr or most of the other predations described in US News, although Pollack does cite one November 2003 attack by Iranian guerillas on a Fallujah police station as an example of bad behavior. Sadr's name doesn't even appear in the index. If Pollack believes the swirling accusations about Iran's involvement in the insurgency to be false, he should have made some effort to debunk them rather than letting them stand. I was also troubled by Pollack's use of Wikipedia as a source on the 1973 Oil Crisis (aren't there books on that subject?), and I imagine I could find other problems if I cared to look. Not to mention the fact that Pollack has never been to Iran, and doesn't speak any Farsi.

My bottom line: I can't recommend this book unless you know little about Iran, don't follow the news, and can't bother to read the James Fallows piece or Pollack's burgeoning list of editorials on the subject. But don't believe the knee-jerk reactions from left blogistan, either. Pollack should have done a better job, but this isn't Threatening Storm II.

chez Nadezhda has received its first suggestions for additions to the menu as well as some thoughts on entertainment offerings. The Brooding Persian has thoughtfully shared a couple of items he thought Oscar in particular would find of interest.

I expect the culinary specialites aren't in MC MasterChef's current repetoire, but we'll consult with him about including a dish or two as occasional plats du jour on the carte. As for the entertainment, we hadn't been planning to build a facility capable of handling entertainment on quite such a scale, but perhaps we could include an events calendar to let guests know when entertainers of interest will be appearing near them.

Just in case anyone was wondering, "Bush will still pursue 'agressive foreign policy'" according to Colin Powell in an interview with the FT. (State Dept transcript here.)

“The president is not going to trim his sails or pull back,” Mr Powell told the Financial Times on Monday. “It's a continuation of his principles, his policies, his beliefs.” In his first interview since the presidential election last Tuesday, Mr Powell stressed Mr Bush had won a mandate to pursue a foreign policy that was in the US national interest.

That policy would also be in the interest of friends and alliances, and while it would be “multilateral in nature”, the US would act alone where necessary.   more »

After reading this very creative James Fallows piece (subscriber only) detailing a mock wargaming exercise concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program, I can understand why some folks might be attracted to the idea of a velvet revolution as a solution to America's Iran problem.

The Atlantic assembled a group consisting of some usual suspects: retired USAF Colonel Sam Gardiner (who penned a typo-laden expose of the Pentagon's GWII psy-ops), Reuel Marc Gerecht (everyone's favorite former spy--sorry, Robert Baer fans), David Kay (of "We were almost all wrong" fame), Kenneth Pollack (author of the new book, Oops I screwed up on Iraq, howsabout Iran?), and a few other guys I'd never heard of.

Playing the role of CENTCOM (and sometimes the CIA), Gardiner gave an extensive PowerPoint presentation (one that would certainly give Edward Tufte fits of apoplexy) to kick off the game.

The article itself is tough to summarize, so I've taken the, ahem, liberty, of excerpting some of the slides for the benefit of our loyal readers here. (The slides, by the way, are also riddled with typos).    more »