The power of the Fatwa

Posted on January 23, 2006 by Sappho

I was brows­ing the news today, I noticed that every­body is writ­ing about the war option with Iran and all the debates are going in the direc­tion of:
Is the US going to attack Iran or not?

But no one men­tioned one weapon avail­able to Iran but not to the US.

Being not Iran or the US fan, I think it’s for the ben­e­fit of Iraq to see such con­fronta­tion, but the prob­lem is If it’s hap­pen (which I doubt it’s ever going to hap­pen) both sides are going to choose Iraq as a war ground.


With one word from the cler­ics in Iran they can mobi­lize every Shiia on earth to fight against the US, includ­ing Iraqi Shiia.

If such Fatwa issued by Iran, even Sis­tani can do noth­ing about it only to accept because the Iran­ian spir­i­tual leader is in much higher sta­tus in the Shiia pyra­mid reli­gious hier­ar­chy , noth­ing hap­pened yet and Shiia cler­ics are ral­ly­ing to give their sup­port to Iran, here is Al-Sadr for exam­ple “

So if you want to dis­cuses Iran-US war option keep in mind the power of the fatwa.

Side note
The same in Iraq (Cha­l­abi and gang), in Iran there are also Iran­ian oppor­tunists who wants to come to power as soon as possible.

Tehran plans nuclear weapon test by March

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11 Responses to The power of the Fatwa

  1. Pingback: The power of the Fatwa :: from www.uruknet.info :: news from occupied Iraq - ch

  2. Jon says:
    January 24, 2006 at 08:08

    Secret weapon? Bush is prob­a­bly count­ing on it. That would make one hell of a “honey pot”.

  3. Nadia says:
    January 24, 2006 at 12:58

    “Spin­ner said he was happy with the deci­sion but said his client should never have been charged. He said it seems the mil­i­tary jury accepted his argu­ment that Welshofer did what he thought was right with­out clear guid­ance from his com­man­ders and dur­ing a chaotic time.

    “When you send our men and women over there to fight, and to put their lives on the line, you’ve got to back them up, you’ve got to give them clear rules, and you’ve got to give them enough room to make mis­takes with­out treat­ing them like crim­i­nals,” he said.“
    http://www.uruknet.info/?p=19899&hd=0&size=1&l=x

    Now what can I say????????? Other then that small kids know that sit­ting on a per­son who you put into a sleep­ing­bag, putting prea­sure on their mouth and body IS NOT DONE, small kids in school under­stand this and here we have a grown up man who does not know this, oh sorry he did not have guidence???!???!?!? What a bunch of crim­i­nals who sup­port each other. No won­der these guys are so afraid of the ICC.

  4. Nadia says:
    January 24, 2006 at 13:01

    It really makes you won­der what sort life did that crim­i­nal had back home if this sort of crim­nal behavour was OKEY for him..

  5. M says:
    January 24, 2006 at 19:47

    What’s the prob­lem cause the real mus­lims that prac­tice Islam as it should be would just ignore the fatwa, right?

  6. Jon says:
    January 25, 2006 at 09:13

    The Iran-Israel Mis­con­cep­tion
    By Kaveh L Afrasi­abi, Jan 25, 2006

    Iran’s Israel pol­icy is a sub-set of its US pol­icy, not the other way around. Given the cur­rent war of words between Iran and Israel, this is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion seem­ingly missed by many of the media and pro-Israel law­mak­ers in Wash­ing­ton, includ­ing Sen­a­tor Hillary Clin­ton, who has lam­basted the Bush admin­is­tra­tion for being soft on Iran and “out­sourc­ing” the United States’ Iran pol­icy to the Europeans.

    Ever since Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­mud Ahmadine­jad made his state­ments about “wip­ing Israel off the Mid­dle East map” and the “myth of Holo­caust”, all hes­i­ta­tions about an Iran­ian “exis­ten­tial threat” to the State of Israel have been cast aside, cul­mi­nat­ing in grow­ing con­gres­sional ini­tia­tives to fore­stall the “Hitler of the Mid­dle East” from acquir­ing nuclear weapons aimed at the Jew­ish state, to quote a lead­ing Repub­li­can law­maker in the US.

    Accord­ing to New York Times colum­nist David Brook, there are diver­gent opin­ions in the US Con­gress on how to deal with Iran, with three out of four camps coun­sel­ing tough action.

    In com­par­i­son, the Israeli press indi­cates a grow­ing pub­lic con­sen­sus about the neces­sity of mil­i­tary action to stop Iran’s per­ceived march toward nuclear weapons, some hint­ing a strike will hap­pen as early as March, as a pre­lude to Israel’s com­ing elections.

    So, as the drum­beats for yet another mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion in the tur­bu­lent Per­sian Gulf region get louder almost by the minute, dim­ming hopes for a diplo­matic solu­tion, a reflec­tive pause is called for.

    Inter­est­ingly, it is dif­fi­cult to find any expert on Iran’s for­eign affairs who actu­ally shares the view of a strate­gic con­flict between Iran and Israel. A case in point is Shahram Chu­bin, who has penned, “Iran and Israel have no dif­fer­ences or occa­sions for get­ting into active hos­til­i­ties, let alone a nuclear exchange.”

    This view is shared by, among oth­ers, political-science pro­fes­sor Nader Entes­sar, who has writ­ten: “There are no sig­nif­i­cant strate­gic con­flicts between Iran and Israel that would force these two coun­tries to go to war against each other.”

    His­tory plays a role here and Iran’s legacy of lib­er­at­ing the Jews and allow­ing them to return to their “home­land” in Cyrus the Great’s edict forms an irrefutable dimen­sion of Iran’s out­ward outlook.

    Briefly, the rea­sons put forth by such pol­icy experts are as fol­lows: Iran and Israel do not share a com­mon bor­der and their respec­tive national inter­ests are not in fun­da­men­tal col­li­sion with each other. Iran is not an Arab coun­try, like Iraq under Sad­dam Hus­sein, which would be con­sid­ered a “front­line” state against Israel, and it has other national-security threats, eg, the asym­met­ri­cal power of the US in the Per­sian Gulf, more press­ing than the “out of area” Israel.

    Cer­tainly, the extent to which Israel com­ple­ments the US power pro­jec­tion in the Mid­dle East, given the “for­ward base” stock­pil­ing of US mil­i­tary hard­ware in Israel, Iran’s counter-hegemonic aspi­ra­tions col­lide with Israel, but only as a sub-set of the US-Iran games of strat­egy that have been ongo­ing for more than two decades.

    Notwith­stand­ing the United States’ over­whelm­ing mil­i­tary supe­ri­or­ity and the asym­me­try of warfight­ing capa­bil­i­ties between Iran and the US, it makes per­fect sense, strate­gi­cally speak­ing, for Iran to resort to the reme­dial tar­get­ing of Israel, the United States’ strate­gic part­ner in the region.

    In other words, Iran’s cur­rent expres­sions of hos­til­i­ties toward Israel are bet­ter under­stood from the prism of the US and Iran and how Tehran ben­e­fits in its inces­sant search for regional allies to off­set US power. This it does through its anti-Israel pos­tur­ing, using threats against Israel as the United States’ Achilles’ heel.

    This brings us to the notion that Tehran’s road to Wash­ing­ton, that is detente between the two coun­tries, goes through Tel Aviv, and that Iran’s ces­sa­tion of hos­til­i­ties toward Israel is the sine qua non for Washington’s will­ing­ness to nor­mal­ize ties with Tehran.

    This is wrong, and the sooner US politi­cians real­ize it the bet­ter. Iran’s US pol­icy goes first: its Israel pol­icy is a com­po­nent of this. Put sim­ply, Tehran’s road to Wash­ing­ton does not travel through Jerusalem; rather, indulging in metaphors for a moment, it is a straight high­way with sev­eral exit lanes, one of which is Israel.

    Con­se­quently, should a war break out between Iran and Israel in the (near) future, ret­ro­spec­tively it will most likely be inter­preted by future his­to­ri­ans as yet another exam­ple of how mis­per­cep­tions cause war. Robert Jervis, in his impor­tant book Per­cep­tion and Mis­per­cep­tion in Inter­na­tional Pol­i­tics, has aptly detailed how the 1967 war was insti­gated by an Israeli mis­per­cep­tion of the inten­tions of Egypt’s leader, Gemal Abdul Nasser, who was vil­i­fied then as an “Arab Hitler” out to destroy Israel.

    It turns out that Nasser’s fiery anti-Zionist rhetoric was mostly for domes­tic con­sump­tion and his deci­sion to remove the United Nations buffer forces from the Sinai and the like were not in prepa­ra­tion for war but sim­ply maneu­vers meant to bol­ster Syria’s position.

    Sadly, it appears that the same mis­per­cep­tions are sow­ing the seeds of yet another bloody con­flict in the Mid­dle East, and one only hopes that learn­ing from the past can make a dif­fer­ence, much as it is cur­rently dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish facts from mis­per­cep­tions, pub­lic pos­tures from poli­cies and intentions.

    At this point a ques­tion: What about Iran’s alleged drive to build nuclear weapons, and doesn’t that pose a strate­gic threat to Israel? Again, most Iran experts are unan­i­mous that Iran’s nucleariza­tion must be traced first and fore­most to Iraq’s nuclear threat dur­ing the 1980s and 1990s, which no Iran­ian, sec­u­lar or reli­gious, could afford to ignore.

    To elab­o­rate, we know now that in 1987 Iraq had exper­i­mented with a radi­a­tion bomb that it had planned to use against Iran had the war with that coun­try not ended a year later. In 1994, Khid­hir Hamza, a for­mer high-ranking Iraqi offi­cial who defected to the US, revealed that Sad­dam was pur­su­ing a nuclear weapon. Such news fueled Iran’s national-security anx­i­eties and the fear of being dwarfed by a nuclear-armed Sad­dam, which revi­tal­ized Iran’s nuclear program.

    In the two years since Saddam’s down­fall, the strate­gic envi­ron­ment around Iran has improved dra­mat­i­cally and Iran’s fear of an Arab bomb has been put to rest, although there is a resid­ual fear of Saudi Arabia’s or Egypt’s pro­lif­er­a­tion in the future, and this, in turn, has seeped into Iran­ian strate­gic thinking.

    But it has been held back by the twin fear of US power and its “satanic” inten­tions against Iran, given Pres­i­dent George W Bush’s inclu­sion of Iran as part of an “axis of evil”, along with Iraq and North Korea.

    Bush’s self-declared new Amer­i­can man­i­fest des­tiny, to bring demo­c­ra­tic civ­i­liza­tion to the Mid­dle East by regime change if need be, has not sat well with the proud Ira­ni­ans, who have reacted angrily via the mil­i­tant Ahmadine­jad, whom the US sees as an affront to its (geo)political engi­neer­ing in the Mid­dle East.

    At the same time, the well of shared inter­ests between Tehran and Wash­ing­ton in Afghanistan and Iraq runs deep and it would be another mis­per­cep­tion to think that con­flict­ing inter­ests over­whelm coin­cid­ing ones. On the con­trary, Iran’s and the United States’ inter­ests, eg, against the threat of the Tal­iban and in favor of the cur­rent regimes in Kabul and Bagh­dad, poten­tially set the stage for a mean­ing­ful secu­rity talk ori­ented toward rapprochement.

    For the moment, how­ever, such poten­tial is deeply buried by the piles of hos­tile rhetoric threat­en­ing to cause a mutual pol­icy screen blind­ing both sides to their shared or par­al­lel inter­ests. Here, a US pledge of non-intervention in Iran’s domes­tic affairs and a promise of Iran’s inclu­sion in the secu­rity infra­struc­ture of the Per­sian Gulf could go a long mile in assuag­ing Iran’s national-security paranoia.

    To con­clude, as Jervis has com­pe­tently shown in his book, pru­dent deci­sions on war and peace can only be made when pol­i­cy­mak­ers suc­cess­fully sep­a­rate images from real­ity, per­cep­tions from mis­per­cep­tions, and this insight alone makes read­ing his book a must pri­or­ity by folks in Tehran, Wash­ing­ton and Tel Aviv.

  7. Halliburton Oil says:
    January 25, 2006 at 14:23

    fatwa

    Iran not only has the will to build a nuclear arse­nal, it has the physi­cists, engi­neers, tech­nol­ogy, ura­nium feed­stocks, and the Cash.

    just to be clear, Iran has begun to build a nuclear arsenal.

    Since the fall of the Shaw, Iran’s *neigh­bors* [NSEW] have had good rea­son to fear Iran and con­ducted state craft accord­ingly. The record is open sourced and volu­mi­nous. and even recent

    to whit:

    Iran’s shuts off sup­ply of nat­ural gas to Turkey inex­plic­a­bly by 70% last Fri­day.
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA24Ak02.html

    scroll through a few of these speeches and inter­views.
    http://www.memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S6#

    in the region, Iran’s only real ally is fac­sist Syria.

    *******************************************************
    Inter­est­ingly, it is dif­fi­cult to find any expert on Iran’s for­eign affairs who actu­ally shares the view of a strate­gic con­flict between Iran and Israel.

    ******************************************************

    When one state declares that it will wipe another state out of existance,

    you’ve arrived at full blown STRATEGIC!

    your whole post jon is wank fatwa.

    keep try­ing :)

  8. Charles says:
    January 25, 2006 at 17:32

    Wow!

    So this fel­low is say­ing that there is no ratio­nal strate­gic basis for direct con­fronta­tion between Iran and Israel? Bravo! I guess we will have to chalk up islamic and arab aggres­sion towards Israel as irra­tional. But wait — we already knew that. Its bloody irrational.

    Now let’s not allow any irra­tional islamic freaks get nuclear weapons to use as tools to exe­cute their irra­tional for­eign policy.

  9. Jon says:
    January 26, 2006 at 06:55

    Hey, I don’t write the arti­cles, I just post ‘em. How­ever, I’ve heard this opin­ion in more than one place; ie — that Iran’s aggres­sive pol­icy has the pur­poses of 1) the effort to ingra­ti­ate itself to and gar­ner alliance from the Arab world against the US threat and b) to cre­ate a proxy tar­get due to the fact that Iran could never attack the US directly. So, as the arti­cle says, Iran’s stance on Israel is a byprod­uct of their US pol­icy and not the other way around.

    Also, regard­ing Iran’s nuclear arse­nal, opin­ions vary and, with no proof, nobody can state an opin­ion with any cer­tainty and the more vastly held opin­ion is that Iran is more than a decade away from cre­at­ing nuclear weapons if that is the direc­tion they are indeed head­ing. Regard­less, I’m pretty sure the Repub­li­can party won’t sur­vive going to war against another coun­try with­out any actual proof of malfeasance.

    Addi­tion­ally, Iran is no Iraq. They are ten times the mil­i­tary threat, not to men­tion about 4 times the land mass, that Iraq was. I’m doubt­ful that we are going to be fight­ing wars on three fronts any time soon, so it’s fairly irrelevant.

    Besides, I have a feel­ing that Iran’s only real inter­est is to be offered state and eco­nomic secu­rity assur­ances. Don’t for­get that George Bush threat­ened Iran first. I’m bet­ting that Iran will end up get­ting the same diplo­matic treat­ment that North Korea got and then things will set­tle down.

    And don’t try to bull­shit me. If Jane’s says that any guesses as to Iran’s nuclear capa­bil­i­ties and inten­tions are spec­u­la­tion, I’m not going to believe either of you two over them.

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