[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

Amir Taheri's "Who Should Apologize to Whom?" (full text below) seriously
mangles the words of President Clinton at Davos.

The following was transcribed from the video of Clinton's remarks

http://clients.world-television.com/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2005/_S13924.asp#

Iran is the most perplexing problem in a way that we face today for the
following reasons:

It's the only .country in the world with two governments

And it is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since
the first election of President Khatami . The only one with elections,
including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where
the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the
vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the
Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I
identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other
country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own."

But here's the problem: under their constitution the religious council
headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini has the authority over intelligence
funding, terrorism funding, and has the power to invalidate laws and scratch
candidates from the candidate list. So the people that represent the 30% to
a third can negate much of what the two thirds or seventy percent want. And
the president is in the middle getting whipsawed and the people underneath
him supporting him get more and more disillusioned.

Now, they still kind of like the West ion general and America in particular
because we don't represent what they don't like about the governing of Iran
since Ayatollah Khomeini.

What no on can answer is: number one how would those two thirds react if
some military action were taken.

Rose: What's your guess?

Clinton: It depends on what it is. Everybody talks about what the Israelis
did in Osirak in 1981 which I think in retrospect was a really good thing.
You know, it kept Saddam from developing nuclear power. But they had that
available. It is not clear to me that that option is available in Iran. And
is not clear to me if we did a lot more than that and a lot of civilians got
killed that you wouldn't lose the two thirds that you've got.

And its also - you're not fooling with Iraq. Whatever you may say - these
guys did not have the capacity to hurt their neighbors and the United
States. Iran is more than three times as big. They have a very
sophisticated network [on 9/11 when he heard of it he told aides ]...only
Bin Laden or the Iranians could have done it. But the Iranians didn't do
it because they have a country. They have targets. We would have had to
level Teheran if they did this while Bin Laden lives in a cave in
Afghanistan. But they are not without means - in other words. They are very
smart. They are very well funded ...I still hope that there is a diplomatic
solution.

It is madness.

There is an elected government in Teheran that is supported by two thirds of
the people that wants a rapprochement with the West and we can't get there .
It's crazy.

...If Iran had a nuclear weapon the main thing that it would do is cast a
pall over the middle east. But it would take a long time before they would
use it because they would be toast if they would use it.

So what is the real worry? If you have ever seen these facilities - the
real worry is the same as with Pakistan:

What if the people representing a third in Iran, that has the religious
council, decide the fissile materials should be smuggled out of Iran and
given to a terrorist group?

We now know this: you can get on internet and see this. If you have
basically a cookie's worth of fissile material and you put it into a
traditional bomb you can amplify the destructive power by a hundred fold -
or more. So the reason you don't want Iran to have an active nuclear
program is, given the present state of play - is that you will never know
if the materials are secure or are being transported to terrorist networks.

...I don't know if this option (destroying a nuclear site with one or two
bombs without many civilian casualties) is available today. ]
.

====
Who Should Apologize to Whom?
Amir Taheri Arab News Saturday, 5, March, 2005 (24, Muharram, 1426)
www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=59952&d=5&m=3&y=2005

Where is the country that Bill Clinton, a former president of the United
States, feels ideologically most at home?

Before you answer, here is the condition that such a country must fulfill:
It must hold several consecutive elections that produce 70 percent
majorities for "liberals and progressives."

Well, if you thought of one of the Scandinavian countries or, perhaps, New
Zealand or Canada, you are wrong.

Believe it or not, the country Bill Clinton so admires is the Islamic
Republic of Iran.

Here is what Clinton said at a meeting on the margins of the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just a few weeks ago: "Iran today is, in a
sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency.
It is there that the ideas that

I subscribe to are defended by a majority."

And here is what Clinton had to say in a recent television interview with
Charlie Rose:

"Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since
the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with
elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name
it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70
percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the
Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election,
the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is
no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own."

So, while millions of Iranians, especially the young, look to the United
States as a mode of progress and democracy, a former president of the US
looks to the Islamic Republic as his ideological homeland.

But who are "the guys" Clinton identifies with?

There is, of course, President Muhammad Khatami who, speaking at a
conference of provincial governors last week, called for the whole world to
convert to Islam.

"Human beings understand different affairs within the global framework that
they live in," he said. "But when we say that Islam belongs to all times and
places, it is implied that the very essence of Islam is such that despite
changes (in time and place) it is always valid."

There is also Khatami's brother, Muhammad-Reza, the man who, in 1979, led
the "students" who seized the US Embassy in
Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. There is Massumeh
Ebtekar, a poor man's pasionaria who was spokesperson for the
hostage-holders in Tehran. There is also the late Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali,
known to Iranians as "Judge Blood".

Not surprisingly, Clinton's utterances have been seized upon by the
state-controlled media in Tehran as a means of countering President George
W. Bush's claim that the Islamic Republic is a tyranny that oppresses the
Iranians and threatens the stability of the region.

Clinton's declaration of love for the mullas shows how ill informed even a
US president could be.

Didn't anyone tell Clinton, when he was in the White House, that elections
in the Islamic Republic were as meaningless as those held in the Soviet
Union? Did he not know that all candidates had to be approved by the
"Supreme Guide", and that no one from opposition is allowed to stand? Did he
not know that all parties are banned in the Islamic Republic, and that such
terms as "progressive" and "liberal" are used by the mullas as synonyms for
"apostate", a charge that carries a death sentence?

More importantly, does he not know that while there is no democracy without
elections there can be elections without democracy?

Clinton told his audience in Davos, as well as Charlie Rose, that during his
presidency he had "formally apologized on behalf of the United States" for
what he termed "American crimes against Iran."

But what were those "crimes"? Clinton summed them thus: "It's a sad story
that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh,
who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back and
then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms
of one Saddam Hussein. We got rid of the parliamentary democracy {there}
back in the '50s; at least, that is my belief."

Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America-First coalition, Clinton appears
to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s
was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the
Shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister. Mossadegh was named prime
minister twice by the Shah and twice dismissed. In what way that meant that
the US "got rid of parliamentary democracy" that did not exist is not clear.

There are at least two things that Clinton does not know about Iran and
Iranians.

The first is that the claim that the US changed the course of Iranian
history on a whim would be seen by most Iranians, a proud people, as an
insult from an arrogant politician who exaggerates the powers of his nation
more than half a century ago. The second thing that Clinton does not know is
that in the Islamic Republic that he so admires, Mossadegh, far from being
regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of
the first acts of the mullas after seizing power in 1979 was to take the
name of Mossadegh off a street in Tehran. They then sealed off the village
where Mossadegh is buried to prevent his supporters from gathering at his
tomb. History textbooks written by the mullas present Mossadegh as the "son
of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed Shah, and
betrayed Islam."

Apologizing to the mullas for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadegh is like
begging Josef Stalin's pardon for a discourtesy toward Alexander Kerensky.

Clinton does not know that it was President Harry S. Truman's energetic
intervention in 1946 that forced Stalin to withdraw his armies from
northwestern Iran thus foiling a Communist attempt to dismember the Iranian
state.

Clinton does not know that if anyone has to apologize it is the mullas who
should apologize to both the Iranian and the American peoples. He does not
appear to remember images of American diplomats paraded in front of TV
cameras, blindfolded, and threatened with summary execution every day -
images that did lasting damage to the good name of Iran as a civilized
nation.

Speaking of apologies, Clinton also ignores the fact that Iranian agents in
Lebanon, led by the " liberal progressive" Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Mohtashami,
organized and carried out a string of terrorist attacks in the 1980s that
cost the lives of over 300 US citizens, including 240 Marines.

And does Clinton remember the dozens of American citizens who were held
hostage by the mullas' agents in Lebanon, sometimes for more than five
years?

Clinton forgets that anti-Americanism, and hatred of the West in general, is
the ideological backbone of Khomeinism; that that the devise of the mullas'
regime is "Death to America", and that the American flag is burned or
trampled under foot in thousands of official buildings throughout Iran every
day?

Clinton claims that the mullas "still kind of like the West in general, and
America in particular." That must be as much news to the mullas as to anyone
else.

The former president endorses another claim of the mullas that Saddam
Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator, invaded Iran on behalf of the United
States.

Clinton says: "Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s
he did with the full, knowing support of the United States government."

Don't be surprised if Clinton's next apology is addressed to Saddam Hussein,
another victim of American Imperialism!