Shirin Ebadi tells the 'progressive' Nation magazine:
The only sort of sanctions she is willing to support are direct, political sanctions that target Iran's leaders, from those involved in the Iranian nuclear program to the country's highest officials. Such sanctions, she suggests, could restrict these officials' travel abroad and could order the seizure of privately held assets. In addition, Ebadi believes, the world's countries could collectively shun the Iranian state. "What I mean is that all the countries of the world should reduce or lower the level of their political relations with Iran, so that they convince Iran to improve the situation of human rights. This was you can isolate the government of Iran without really damaging the people," she says.
But the best course is one of dialogue. "The political sanctions should be used as a last resort," she says. "Dialogue has to take place at three levels: at the level of people and civil society, among members of parliament of both countries, and by heads of government of both countries. And negotiations have to be direct and public."
After all, she has to give them at least something back for all the financial and political support she has recovered in the past few years. This also includes her utter silence about the savage treatment the people of Gaza are getting from Israel.
It's sickening how a bunch of Iranian reformists turned exiled-opposition are calling Ahmadinejad a neoconservative, to justify themselves and make their puppet masters at the State Deprtment and Hoover Institute happy.
Ahmadinejad has courageously reversed 16 years of disastrous free-market economic policies of Rafsanjani and Khatami which were gradually destroying the entire dream of the Iranian nation who revolted against the tyrannical and dependent regime of the Shah and basically selling Iran to the American corporations, IMF and the World Bank.
These are the same people who, in their Persian-language media, have been crying foul the whole past three years that Ahmadinejad has driven out the senior Rafsanjanist corrupt businessmen/politicians out of office and have been calling him a socialist and comparing him with Chavez. And they sell Ahmadinejad to the American democrats as a conservative.
One should ask them what is really conservative about Ahmadinejad. Econimically no one has ever cared more about the distribution of oil income than him. Politically, he has done the most radical reforms in the bureaucratic structure of Iran. (One example is decentralising the central budgeting organization and distributing across each province.) Culturally, he has given permission to the first Western pop musician (Chris de Burgh) to come to Iran an perform publicly. Socially, he has tried to allow women into the stadiums which Khatami and Rafsanjani never had the balls to do so. And these are just a few examples.
If despite all these things, they still dare to call this guy a (neo)conservative, then what can one label Khatami and Rafsanjani? How can get away with such nonsense without showing even one single factor that Ahmadinejad has in common with the American neoconservatives?
I wonder how far they are going in bashing this man and disrespecting millions of people who chose him against Rafsanjani, the true reincarnation of the Shah.