Islamic Republic Bullying and bedazzled Pundits

The mobsters who rule Iran let the British Sailors captives go after only a few days of extracting confessions and submission to hejab. Some useful idiots are at again and displaying their cluelessness with fanfare and invoking all kinds of methods that worked with a nation state such as Soviet Union during the Cold War. Here is a sample of delusional Taqiyya (asking for surrender aka "engagement") being regarded as serious expert opinions in The Ny Times:

THROUGH the capture of and subsequent announcement that it would release 15 British sailors and marines, the Islamic Republic of Iran sent its adversaries a pointed message: just as Iran will meet confrontation with confrontation, it will respond to what it perceives as flexibility with pragmatism. This message is worth heeding as the United States and Iran seem to be moving inexorably toward conflict.

The timing of the Britons’ capture was no accident. The incident followed the passage of a United Nations resolution censuring Iran for its nuclear infractions, the dispatch of American aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf and the American sanctioning of Iranian banks. Although the Bush administration has been busy proclaiming its increasingly confrontational Iran policy a success, Tehran’s unsubtle conduct in the Persian Gulf suggests otherwise. Iran today sees regional stability in its interest. It abandoned the goal of exporting its revolution to its Persian Gulf neighbors at the end of 1980s and has since acted as a status-quo power. It seeks influence within the existing regional power structure. It improved its relations with its Persian Gulf neighbors throughout the 1990s, and in particular normalized relations with Saudi Arabia. Iran supported the stabilization of Afghanistan in 2001 and that of Iraq during the early phase of the occupation. Conflict will change the direction that Iranian foreign policy has been following, and this will be a change for the worse and for the more confrontational.

A judicious engagement policy will require patience and must begin with a fundamental shift in the style and content of American diplomacy. The breakthrough in American-Chinese relations during the Nixon administration followed such a course. Beijing responded favorably to engagement only after two years of unilateral American gestures. As part of a similar effort toward Iran, the Unites States should try to create a more suitable environment for diplomacy by taking actions that gradually breach the walls of mistrust...

The authors of the article above sound more like the official spokespersons of the Islamic Republic rather than a professor who teaches, of all places, in the Naval Postgraduate School and a pundit at the Council on Foreign Relations here in the USA.

As I have previously stated, the only talk and incentive the mullahs are interested in is what President Kennedy gave to Fidel Castro and its Soviet masters. If Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh are so hell-bent on giving the Islamic Republic (theofascists) what they want which is a hands-off pledge from the United State, then why not show some backbone and flat out ask for it and while they're at it, they should also explain how this kind of 'grand concession' has helped the Cuban people to achieve freedom, prosperity, and liberty.


The fact that the bully occasionally lets the scrawny kid go, and even offers him a sweaty hug and a peanut butter sandwich, is cause for neither celebration nor relief. It's a temporary reprieve.

The fact that Iran didn't give the U.K. hostages the usual treatment it reserves for its own dissenters, something along these lines . . .


. . . doesn't mean it's time to start trusting Iran with our very lives and step aside while it finishes arming itself with nuclear weapons.

Quite the contrary. Iran's release of the hostages is intended to encourage just such naivete and buy the regime the time it needs to make Allah's bomb. All of sudden, there are no more talks of abduction but liberation.The propaganda war continues, still powerful, and still in the hands of Tehran, or rather in the sophisticated PR machine at the service of the regime. The abrupt change in direction by the mullahs from enduring crisis to sudden solution is the product of their PR machine (mostly Western Advisors).

Be glad these hostages were released, but don't be a fool! And please don't forget:

While we can be grateful for the captives' release, no one should conclude from this episode that the Iranian government is taking a new peaceful turn, or that its President has become Mahmoud the Munificent. If anything, the events of the past two weeks show the opposite--notably the influence inside the regime of the Revolutionary Guards, who provoked the incident by seizing the sailors in Iraqi waters only hours after a unanimous vote in the U.N. Security Council to stiffen sanctions against Iran's nuclear program. Their objective was clearly to create some negotiating leverage and humiliate Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is leaving office later this year. Hostage-taking has been a tool of Iranian foreign policy going back to 1979, and this was merely another turn of that wheel.

Mr. Blair's decision to use diplomacy to gain the sailors' release paid off, but as the second week of the hostage crisis neared its end, it was also becoming clear that British patience was beginning to wear thin. The implicit warning in the Prime Minister's comment Tuesday that the next 48 hours would be "fairly critical" would not have gone unnoticed in Tehran. That the mullahs are now releasing the hostages is not an act of charity but a recognition that the hostage-taking would cost Iran more diplomatically--and perhaps militarily--than it would gain.

One benefit of this episode is that it provoked the press to start reporting on the Revolutionary Guards and elite al Quds force. These highly trained and well-financed fighters are the regime's instruments of violence from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories--where they arm Hezbollah and Hamas--to Iraq, where Iranian-supplied weapons are killing American and British soldiers.
For that reason, it's important to separate Iran's hostage-taking from the entirely lawful arrest by the U.S. of five Iranians in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil in January. Some hyperbolic British reporting has linked the two, but the Iranians were part of a Revolutionary Guard network that was supplying money and weapons to killers in Iraq. It would be a bad sign, and only encourage more hostage-taking, if the five Iranians were now released quickly in what Iran might claim is a quid pro quo.

While the release of the Brits is cause for celebration, we hope the world won’t forget those who aren’t getting out – the myriad political prisoners, often democrats, in Iran’s dungeons. These are the truly courageous people the West has paid too little attentions to as it focuses on diplomacy and business with Iran. Given his regime’s persecution of Iran’s tiny Christian community, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s invocation of Easter as a reason for freeing the sailors is particularly offensive.