Here is the official BBC description of the show:

Does every country have the right to be nuclear? (Listen to the entire show - MP3 file)

25 April 2008

America has accused Syria or developing a reactor with North Korea's help. If it was there, it's not anymore as Israel bombed the site. Syria says the accusations are nonsense. But what of the principle here... Why shouldn't Syria or any other country develop nuclear facilities whether for weapons or energy? 45 african countries have expressed their desire for nuclear power... Would you oppose them getting it?

Duration: 51mins | File Size: 24MB

Then when I got back, I was invited to have a little presentation in the Middle East department at the Columbia University about what I saw in the elections. I decided to put them together in a few chapters and make a longer version documentary.

I wanted to put it in this blog before the recent parliament elections, but I didn't manage to. Here it is now:

Watch: Iran Elections 2005

Today’s Woman features a profile with. Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, and Founder of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, regarding his views on Iranian women activists.

Neith I am surprised that you can't find a single word of support or sympathy in Jahanbegloo's work for, say, Gazans who are living in the largest prison on the planet by the people Jahanbegloo never wants to anger. Or perhaps the universal rules of human dignity that Jahanbegloo praises, do not fully apply to anyone that the Israeli establishment doesn't agree with.

As the late Richard Rorty brilliantly explains, Europe and the U.S. have a very long history to define who is fully human so that those 'universal' rules could be applied to them.

The existence of the rights that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century claimed for all human beings had not been evident to most European thinkers in the previous thousand years. That their existence seems self-evident to Americans and Europeans two hundred-odd years after they were first asserted is to be explained by culture-specific indoctrination rather than by a sort of connaturality between the human mind and moral truth.

To make our case, we anti-foundationalists point to unpleasant historical facts such as the following: The words of the Declaration were taken, by the supposedly democratic government of the US, to apply only to people of European origin. The American Founding Fathers applied them only to the immigrants who had come across the Atlantic to escape from the monarchical governments of Europe. The idea that native Americans – the Indian tribes who were the aboriginal inhabitants – had such rights was rarely taken seriously. Recalcitrant Indians were massacred.

Again, it was only a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence that the citizenry of the US began to take women's rights seriously – began to ask themselves whether American females were being given the same opportunities for the pursuit of happiness as were American males. It took almost a hundred years, and an enormously costly and cruel civil war, before black Americans were given the right not to be held as slaves. It took another hundred years before black Americans began to be treated as full-fledged citizens, entitled to all the same opportunities as whites.

Abdee Kalantari, a U.S.-based regular contributor to this section (and his friend Mehdi Khalaji) has for over the past year consistently recycled Bernard Lewis' arguments. He explicitly dismisses the entire idea of colonialism and advocates such a Eurocentric and Universalist inquiry that, if translated into English, could even be shockingly racist. (Example: Why is the West Afraid of the "Islamic Bomb"?)

The most interesting aspect of all this is that his shallow, racist, and Orientalist articles are not only being handsomely paid by Radio Zamaneh, but they are sadly republished in a reformist daily newspaper in Iran, called Kargozaran, which is run by allies of Hashemi Rafsanjani and is named after their political party, Hezb-e Kargozaran. They probably pay Kalantari for them too. (For instance, in September 2007, eight articles were published in Radio Zamaneh and Kargozaran in a series titled ''A critque of new-nativism'.)

This basically means that the Dutch government is directly funding and advocating a certain line of thinking in the mainstream Iran-based media, and yet it is being tolerated by the Iranian government.

But let's imagine if one wants to challenge Kalantari's prose, given that Radio Zamaneh has never commissioned any critique or counter view to these pieces, who could spend so much time and energy to continuously writing criticism of Zamaneh's articles without being compensated? And if one produces such critiques, how could he or she give it the same exposure that Kalantari's pieces get thanks to the wealthy publishers of his stuff in Amsterdam or in Tehran?

No wonder why Edward Said and other post-colonial thinkers are virtually unknown within Iranian intellectual circles in Iran. From the one hand, writings of the likes of Kalantari are being commissioned and published in Iran by the Euro-American public diplomacy machine, from the other hand the government in Iran doesn't get the necessity of challenging these ideas.

In 2004, with pretext of the earthquake in Bam, Hadi Ghaemi (a NIAC's founding member and now a Human Rights Watch senior officer) and Dokhi Fassihian (a then NIAC executive) held a two-day workshop in Tehran for a group of Iranian NGOs 'aimed at strengthening the ability of NGO’s to document and present their work to funders.'

NIAC's press release names Hamyaran, a capacity-building NGO which is founded and run by Baquer (or Bagher) Namazi (father of Siamak Namazi, a former NED fellow), as its organizer. It also quotes from Ghaemi as:

This workshop was a highly successful collaboration between NIAC and Hamyaran. It achieved two important objectives: Firstly, it provided the NGO community in Iran with concrete professional skills, enabling them to use digital video technology for documenting their work and articulating their message to a broad audience. Secondly, the workshop established valuable links between NIAC and Iranian NGOs. We were able to learn of their needs firsthand and we look forward to providing such effective capacity building tools in the future.

Interestingly enough, in November 2005, Baquer Namazi, was invited by Haleh Esfandiari to Woodrow Wilson Center to talk about the ' The State of Civil Society & NGOs Under Iran’s New Government .'

I might be wrong in stating that this particular workshop was funded specifically by NED, but perhaps NIAC can publisize and thereby clarify how exactly they have spent NED's funds.

But in the light of the events in the past few years, and despite my acquaintance with him and the admiration I generally have for most of things that he has done in NIAC, I would like to raise some doubts and I expect the progressive Iranian-Americans demand explanation from NIAC and Trita Parsi.

National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the bipartsian and sophisticated regime-change machine of the U.S. has awarded three grants to NIAC since its creation in 2002. I directly quote from NED's website:

National Iranian American Council (NIAC) - 2006
$107,000
To foster cooperation between Iranian NGOs and the international civil society community and to strengthen the institutional capacity of NGOs in Iran. NIAC will conduct a three-week training program on project design and grant writing for a group of 14 Iranian civil society leaders. NIAC will assist the trainees in designing a project to be implemented inside Iran and developing grant proposals for their prospective projects.

National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) - 2005
$64,000
To foster cooperation between Iranian and international civic groups and foundations, NIAC will translate resource materials on capacity building into Farsi and post them on its website. To strengthen the capacity of civic organizations in Iran, NIAC will hire a Farsi-English speaking expert to advise local groups on project development, proposal writing and foreign donor relations.

National Iranian American Council (NIAC) - 2002
$25,000
To design and implement a two-day media training workshop in Iran for forty staff members from five civic groups. The training will cover public education and outreach, video production, script writing, and graphics usage, and will help the Council gauge participants general receptiveness to civic activities. Participants will also be trained in project development and proposal writing and will be encouraged to identify their needs, develop a public message, and outline an appropriate publicity campaign.

I think Trita Parsi and NIAC owe an explanation why they have received nearly $200,000 of funds from the NED, what exactly have done with it, and what are the civil society groups in Iran who have been trained using this funding.

How can Parsi and NIAC claim to be against the US intervention in Iran and yet continuously be funded by a U.S. state-funded organization whose entire mission is to intervene in sovereign states' affairs in order to expand American interest and control?

US: overt and covert destabilisation

When a scandal in the 1980s revealed the CIA’s 35 years of international manipulations, President Ronald Reagan established the National Endowment for Democracy as a more discreet and less controversial instrument. It had the same purpose – to destabilise unfriendly governments by funding the opposition.

By Hernando Calvo Ospina

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1983, ostensibly as a non-profit-making organisation to promote human rights and democracy. In 1991 its first president, the historian Allen Weinstein, confessed to The Washington Post: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (1).

Long before the NED was created, the same newspaper had revealed in 1967 how the CIA funded foreign trade unions, cultural organisations, media, and prominent intellectuals. As Philip Agee, a former operative with the Company told me in an interview in 2005: “The CIA used known American foundations, as well as other custom-made entities that existed only on paper.”

Under pressure, President Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation, although he was aware that the CIA had been mandated to carry out such activities since its creation in 1947. Agee said: “In the aftermath of World War II, faced with threats to our democratic allies and without any mechanism to channel political assistance, US policy makers resorted to covert means, secretly sending advisers, equipment and funds to support newspapers and parties under siege in Europe” (2). They had to counter the Soviet Union’s ideological influence at the start of the cold war.

The funded organisations sometimes managed to weaken and even eliminate opposition to friendly governments, while creating a climate favourable to US interests. There were coups, such as the one in Brazil in 1964 that overthrew President João Goulart. The coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973 showed that the US government had not abandoned such methods. Agee claimed: “To prepare the ground for the military, we funded and channelled the forces of leading organisations in civil society and the media. It was an improved version of the coup in Brazil.”

The battle of ideas

In 1975 the CIA was investigated by the Senate, particularly its involvement in plots against political leaders throughout the world, including Patrice Lumumba, Allende and Fidel Castro. The success of revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America forced the US to recognise that although the strategy of infiltrating social organisations remained crucial, the tactics were counter-productive. So, “to wage the battle of ideas, the Johnson administration recommended the establishment of a public-private mechanism to fund overseas activities openly” (3).

The American Political Foundation (APF), established in 1979, was a coalition of the Democratic and Republican parties, union leaders and employers, conservative academics and institutions relating to foreign policy. It was based on a model developed in West Germany, where the four major political parties had set up government-funded foundations as a response to the cold war. The most important of these was the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, linked to the Christian Democratic Union (4).

In January 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed the secret directive NSDD-77 (5), the result of what he described in a speech to the British parliament as a process designed “to foster the infrastructure of democracy” and “to determine how the United States can best contribute… to the global campaign for democracy” (6). The directive called for “close collaboration with foreign policy efforts – diplomatic, economic, military – as well as a close relationship with sectors of the American society – labour, business, universities, philanthropy, political parties, press.”

Reagan kept quiet about the directive when he presented an APF proposal, the Democracy Programme, to Congress. An act of 23 November 1983 ratified the creation of the NED. At a ceremony at the White House in December he announced: “This programme will not be hidden in shadows. It’ll stand proudly in the spotlight. And, of course, it will be consistent with our own national interests” (7).

Anti-Sandinista dollars

The NED consisted of four core organisations responsible for its management. One already existed: the Free Trade Union Institute was a branch of the AFL-CIO trade union federation and was later incorporated into the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity. The others were the Centre for International Private Enterprise, an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce; the National Republican Institute for International Affairs; and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Although legally an NGO, the NED was funded from the State Department budget, subject to congressional approval. As well as allowing the government to disclaim any formal responsibility, this offered a further strategic advantage. As former State Department official William Blum said: “Notice the non-governmental – this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.”

In October 1986 the Reagan administration was shaken by the revelation that it had illegally funded the insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, using money from cocaine trafficking. By coincidence, the operation, coordinated by Colonel Oliver North and authorised by the National Security Council (NSC), was called the Democracy Programme. The NED played a key role. But the investigation was more interested in the funding of the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, the Contras, than in the involvement of this “NGO”, although the NED was supervised from its creation until 1987 by Walter Raymond, a senior CIA officer and a member of the NSC’s intelligence directorate.

The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was an extremist anti-Castro organisation set up by the NSC at the same time as the NED. The foundation’s president, Jorge Mas Canosa, said: “The NED inherited Ronald Reagan’s Democracy Programme and provided funding to many Latin-American groups, including the CANF.” Convinced that the road to Cuban freedom lay through Nicaragua, the CANF committed itself to the anti-Sandinista struggle. Mas Canosa said: “This collaboration began when Theodore Shackley, the CIA’s former deputy director of operations and head of its covert operations section, asked members of the foundation to support Central American policy.”

In 1987, during the Contra scandal, the NED funded a front of anti-Sandinista organisations, including the permanent human rights commission of Nicaragua. This support helped Violeta Chamorro, Washington’s preferred candidate and the owner of the “independent” newspaper La Prensa, to win the presidency in 1990.

A non-governmental crusade

The NED’s talent for channelling money, establishing NGOs, electoral manipulation and media brainwashing owed much to the long experience of the CIA, the State Department’s foreign aid agency USAID, and members of the conservative elite associated with US foreign policy (including John Negroponte, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Francis Fukuyama). Terrorism apart, the Reagan administration used the same methods in eastern Europe, where it conducted “a non-governmental crusade for human rights and democracy which avoided accusations of imperialism by presenting itself as a direct response to the needs of dissidents and reformers worldwide” (8). Here the gap between rulers and ruled made it easier for the NED and its network of organisations to use money and advertising to manufacture thousands of supposed dissidents. After regime change, most of these individuals and the groups to which they had belonged evaporated.

One of the most historic victories was in Poland. As early as 1984 the NED was distributing direct aid to set up trade unions, newspapers and human rights groups, all “independent”. For the 1989 parliamentary elections, the NED handed $2.5m to the Solidarity movement, whose leader Lech Walesa, a powerful ally of the US, was elected president in 1990.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a prelude to the NED’s global expansion. It mobilised its money and expertise to intervene in the social, economic and political affairs of 90 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and eastern Europe. As Gerald Sussman pointed out, “electoral interventions are critically important to US global policy objectives”. “Democracy building” by the NED and other US organisations has been refined: “Compared to the surreptitious and nakedly aggressive manner in which the CIA typically carried out its destabilising forays from the late 1940s through to the mid-1970s, current forms of electoral manipulation are conducted largely as spectacles of spin and moral drama” (9).

During the 1990 elections in Haiti, the NED invested $36m in the candidacy of Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official. Despite this, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected, only to be overthrown in 1991 after a media campaign funded by the NED and USAID.

In its first 10 years, the NED distributed $200m among 1,500 projects to support friends of the US (10). Since 1988 it has taken a significant interest in Venezuela. Philip Agee said: “There was a quiet operation against the Bolivarian revolution. It began under President Clinton and intensified under George Bush Jr. It’s like the campaign against the Sandinistas, but so far without the terrorism or the economic embargo: promote democracy, keep an eye on elections and support public life.” The US lawyer Eva Golinger discovered from official documents that between 2001 and 2006 the NED and USAID gave more than $20m to Venezuelan opposition groups and private media (11). On 25 April 2002 The New York Times revealed that Congress had ordered a quadrupling of the NED budget for Venezuela just a few months before the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez.

The campaign against Cuba

But the NED’s most consistent campaign has been against the government of Cuba, where it is believed to have invested some $20m over 20 years in an attempt to promote a “democratic transition”; $65m more has been contributed by USAID since 1996. Despite continued insistence upon the supreme necessity of democratic elections, official documents clearly specify that those elected must be to US governmental liking. Almost all the funds are in the hands of organisations based in the US and Europe. The governments of Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic receive a significant proportion of it in return for leading international pressure on Cuba. According to Laura Wides-Munoz (Associated Press, 29 December 2006), the NED paid them $2.4m in 2005.

Washington’s idea of democracy is elections and business walking hand in hand. In his January 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that he would be asking Congress “to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labour unions in the Middle East”; ideological work would accompany military action. Hitherto the NED’s involvement in the region had been minimal. It moved into Afghanistan in 2003. According to its website, it decided “to establish and strengthen business associations inside Afghanistan to ensure a more sustained and diversified effort to build democracy and market economy”. It funded emerging NGOs.

NGOs in occupied Iraq were funded with similar objectives, particularly in the north. Local organisations were supported by – and quickly became dependent upon – the NED. Under the banner of the struggle for democracy, they worked for a system whose interests seldom coincided with those of local people.

Uniquely for an NGO, the NED’s president must appear before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee every year to account for its activities. In June 2006 Carl Gershman (president of the NED since April 1984) made an emergency appeal for more funds to support democracy. He claimed that NGOs in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Egypt needed more to confront “semi-authoritarian” governments. He later made an identical speech to the European parliament during the conference, “Democracy Promotion: the European Way”.

According to William Blum, the NED’s basic philosophy is that societies “are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation… [and] minimal government intervention in the economy. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasised. NED’s reports carry on endlessly about democracy, but at best it’s a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers that be.”

A weapon of global war

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September 1989, President George Bush Sr asserted that the challenge facing the world of freedom was to consolidate the foundations of freedom. In 1988, the Canadian parliament, encouraged by the US, had set up an NED clone, Rights and Democracy. In 1992 the British parliament established the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. Sweden followed with the Swedish International Liberal Centre, the Netherlands with the Alfred Mozer Foundation, and France with the Robert Schuman Foundation and the Jean Jaurès Foundation (linked to the Socialist Party).

As its network spread, the NED set up the Democracy Projects Database to coordinate 6,000 projects worldwide. It also created the Network of Democracy Research Institutes to bring together “independent institutions, university-based study centres, and research programs affiliated with political parties, labour unions, and democracy and human rights movements to facilitate contacts among democracy scholars and activists” (12). The NED hosts the Centre for International Media Assistance, which “brings together a broad range of media experts with the objective of strengthening support of free and independent media throughout the world” (13).

On the State Department’s official website, Carl Gershman declared that all these foundations, people and organisations were contributing to “building a worldwide movement for democracy”, a network of networks with the NED at its centre. Other foundations fell into step: the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany; the Olof Palme International Centre in Sweden; the Renner Institute in Austria; and the Pablo Iglesias Foundation, linked to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.

In 1996, to justify increasing the NED’s budget, an enlightening report was submitted to Congress: “The US cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy at a time when American interests and values are under sustained ideological attack from a wide variety of anti-democratic forces around the world… [They] remain threatened by deeply entrenched communist regimes, neo-communists, aggressive dictatorships, radical nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists. Given this reality, the US cannot afford to surrender the ideological battlefield to these enemies of a free and open society.” (14). Three years later, Benjamin Gilman, the president of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the same line.

As Blum put it: “What was done was to shift many of the awful things [done by the CIA] to a new organisation, with a nice sounding name. The creation of the NED was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.”

Hernando Calvo Ospina is a journalist and the author of Bacardi: the Hidden War (Pluto Press, London, 2002). Translated by Donald Hounam

If India were to establish an institution to coordinate and organise exchanges with democrats around the world, richer democracies in the world would want to join with it and help to fund it. And in the near term, we have a ready potential vehicle. The UN Democracy Fund has recently been established, with a substantial budget that includes sizable contributions from India and the United States. It is a natural candidate to provide early support for such a new initiative.

Don't be too surprised. The only reason NED can possibly endorse anything from the UN must be that they have their own guy there; and it's true.

The UN Democracy Fund's executive head, Roland Rich, is a former NED fellow in 2005 and from 1989 to 2005 he was the Foundation Director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions at the Australian National University. In 1997, Louisa Coan, NED's program officer for Asia, called it a 'sister' organization to NED in a testimony at the U.S. congress.

The more you dig into this NED, the uglier and filthier it gets. No wonder they say it is a front for the CIA. But they have now even infiltrated the UN. This is appalling.

The textbooks criticize the West (Europe, North America, and Russia) from four main angles:

1. Europe and the United States are portrayed as enemies of Iran's political independence;
2. the West conspires against the current Islamic regime and against Islamist movements generally;
3. colonial rule by Europeans was unjust to the Islamic countries of the Middle East, and the interests of Islamic countries conflict with those of Western countries; and
4. the Islamist discourse of the textbooks expresses opposition to the West as the birthplace of modern society and sees a clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic world,

Obviously the Freedom House doesn't agree. But what has outraged the Jerusalem Post about the textbooks are not much different from the above paragraph in its refreshing truthfulness that I'm sure you can't find in any other country:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict also appears in the textbooks as a major issue for Muslim countries, with Israel portrayed as an enemy, and an agent of the US.

"The textbooks view Israel as an 'enemy' of Islamic countries and Muslims and an 'agent' of the US and other Western countries. In the textbooks, Israel is 'The regime occupying the Holy Land,' its land is 'occupied Palestine,' and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important concern of Islamic countries.

For example, 'God willing, the day will come when Muslims will all be united and free Palestine and rescue the Holy Land from the clutches of the enemies of Islam.' (Grade 3 Social Studies textbook, p. 57),' the report states.

But if you wonder who has funded the research, I quote from the first pages of the full report (PDF Format):

We are grateful to the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) for their commitment to this project. Producing this report would not have been possible without their generous funding and unwavering support.

Here are the rest of the research team, just in case:

Freedom House also wishes to thank the project’s Advisory Board for their valuable editorial comments and feedback on the report, which improved the quality of the text. The Advisory Board was comprised of the following individuals:

• Antonia Cortese, Executive Vice President, American Federation of Teachers
• Hormoz Hekmat, Managing Editor, Iran Nameh, Foundation for Iranian Studies
• Sanam Vakil, Visiting scholar of Middle East Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Bologna, Italy

I should note that the title is not what I've chosen for this article. It's the Guardian editors' fault if it's too vague:

Chorusing disapproval (The Guardian)

Press reports that Iran's underperforming economy has made Ahmadinejad's government unpopular may be little more than wishful thinking

By Hossein Derakhshan

t's become quite fashionable for journalists to report on the diminishing popularity of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (for example in the Independent, the Herald Tribune and the New York Times), especially focusing on the consequences of his economic policies, which were seen as one of the main reasons he was elected.

But facts on the ground suggest Ahmadinejad is as popular as ever.

Continue reading

I left two comments under their related posts in which I tried to say how all this is similar to the way Iran has been treated for almost 30 years by the same media. There are clues on why I have distanced myself from the Global Voices in the past couple of years.

I left this for Ethan:

Great post, Ethan. But I wonder why the Global Voices coverage on Iran is so terribly biased against the Iranian state and is so similar to what you read everyday in the mainstream media? Why is everything so one-sided?

Frankly, I think there is need for more editorial care when it comes to Iran. No one can trust an anonymous section editor with a pseudonym who can easily hide his or her politics behind a mask of anonymity. And this is worse when there is only one person or view that is covering a huge blogosphere.

And this for Rebecca, who is actually the drive behind this coverage since she lives and works in China:

Great job and great observation, Rebbecca. I'm glad you moved to China, because now you can understand what people like me have been saying for a long time about how the Euro-American media easily twists the facts and gets away with it.

What is happening to reporting on China is actually very similar to the coverage on the Iranian elections, anything that Ahmadinejad says, women, student and workers protests, etc.

I'm affraid to say even the Global Voices' coverage on Iran follows the same pattern in just reproducing the Israeli-American propaganda against Iran, by heavily quoting from a small group of opposition bloggers.

Just take a look at the coverage yourself and compare it to the Chinese coverage. It's quite one-sided and not balanced at all, especially in terms of the topics that are selected and also the blogs that are quoted. Can you for example find anything positive about Ahmadinejad or the state in general, while there is a big chunk of the Iranians blogs now who are supportive of the state and even Ahmadinejad.

Russian, Syria, Iran, Venezuella, Cuba and now China are being misrepresented and demonised on a daily basis in the Western press and sadly Global Voices more or less repeats the same type of coverage.

The good thing is that you are now in China and can see the ugly reality of such propaganda. But what about the rest?

I'm sure by living in Iran for six months and being able to speak the language and hang out with people outside the Northern Tehran bubble, you'd reach to the same conclusion.

A random comment I found the other day on an Iranian website would give the White House an idea about how their attempt is being read in Iran.

The commentator basically said when Khatami was appeasing the Americans and talked of dialogue with the U.S., Bush called Iran evil and put it in an axis along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Now that Ahmadinejad is aggressively standing up against the Americans, the same Bush has started to finally show some respect for the Iranian culture and Nowrooz and have even set up a Haft Sin table -- and even explicitly acknowledges Iran's right for civil use of nuclear energy.

If Iran continues to be defiant and doesn't give up its rights, an average Iranian would argue, the next step would be for the U.S. to acknowledge the right of the Iranian state to exist and accept that the Islamic Republic is a government that a strong majority of Iranians (Not of the type Bush usually gets to meet or get advice from) have chosen and have given legitimacy.

Another term for Ahmadinejad will convince the Americans that the Islamic Republic is Iran is here to stay.

Ahmadinejad is going to be re-elected, as Dieter Bednarz, wonderfully explains why and I think I'm going to proudly vote for him. I have never seen an Iranian politician so caring and so humble about the needy and the oppressed. Let the his capitalist foes in or out of Iran bash him day and night, but he is in people's heart.

Just read these excerpts from Der Spiegel's story and if you haven't watched Majid Majidi's 'Children of Heaven,' (Part one, part two) watch it:

To understand why the poor remain loyal to the president, you have to travel to Shush -- a district located halfway to the gigantic shrine of the revolutionary leader, a complex on the southern outskirts of Tehran. In Khomeini’s last will and testament, he asked to be laid to rest near the “Mostazafin” -- the poorest of the poor.

Anyone who owns an old motorcycle in this area ranks among the more prosperous residents. Rahman Behnami, 60, is not one of them. The father of seven children repairs shoes for a living. Over the past 24 years, the glue has eaten into the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t own a watch and he has no teeth, but has “great faith in God.” This also means that he lets his neighbour tell him who to vote for. “We are too poor to take an interest in politics,” says Mehrdad Shiri, 23, who runs two kebab joints with his father and wields a certain amount of influence in Shush.

He “took care of us even when he was the mayor of Tehran,” says Shiri, while he attends to his few customers. He talks about how Ahmadinejad came here personally -- to these filthy narrow streets, where a man like Larijani would never set foot. That’s why Shiri voted for him. And he’ll do it again. The president has a knack of appearing to be everywhere at once -- and that’s one of the secrets of his success. As the former mayor, he knows that elections are not won in the intellectual north of Tehran but among the grassroots, particularly in rural areas. He doesn’t seem to care that his spectacular appearances cost a fortune and actually hinder the work of the government, as the opposition contends. Ahmadinejad has already visited all 30 provinces with his cabinet.

Ahmadinejad began to present himself as a man of the people back when he was the mayor. Shortly after his election in March 2003, he opened a kind of public consultation office where people could air their grievances just a stone’s throw from his residence on 72nd Square, in a rather proper neighbourhood in eastern Tehran. Today, less than 100 meters from the plain brick house of the Ahmadinejads, petitioners still submit letters to the current president.

Razai Said Hassan, 60, who has lived a few blocks away for quite some time, can name a handful of acquaintances who have been helped by the head of state: Widows received government grants worth 5 million tumans -- the equivalent of €3,500 -- and others were helped with loans. “He’s really there for us,” says Hassan with praise.

“May God protect him,” says Atife, 28, who has managed to make the jump from the poor south to the centre of town. Back in the slums, she had to live in one room with her husband, her son and her mother-in-law. “It was hell.” Now her small family has two rooms in the better neighbourhood of Bani Hashem.

In their humble flat, bare light bulbs hang from the ceiling. The sofa, the glass cabinet and virtually all of Atife’s belongings are actually second-hand worn-out furnishings distributed by a private foundation. Out of gratitude, she now visits their Koran readings once a week. An acquaintance of Atife’s owes her happiness directly to the president. A fund created by Ahmadinejad granted her a loan for her wedding.

No one can say how long the head of state can afford to be this generous. Many of the newly-elected members of parliament want to put an end to the populist good deeds and have already announced tough debates on the budget. But even harsh critics like former government advisor Lailas think that Ahmadinejad still has a good chance of being re-elected.

According to his close aide Ramin, the president wants to stick to his approach of travelling and distributing to the needy.

“The public coffers are full, very full,” says the friend of the president -- and seeks a comparison with the Prophet: “Didn’t Mohammed distribute the state treasury to the poor before he lay down to sleep?”