Suggested Answers to the Second Short Quiz

[johnkarls]

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Editorial Notes:

Each quarter, there is one 5-week gap between meetings. Whenever there is a 5-week gap, we have two Short Quizzes.

The coinciding of this quarter’s 5-week gap with Thieves of State provides an opportunity to explore why Thieves of State ignored Iran, especially in view of how important Iran is to all of the Arab countries that are discussed in Thieves of State.

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Question 1

“Day of Rage” was the name given to Valentine’s Day 2011 by whom? Why?

Answer 1

By Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of Iran’s Green Revolution.

To show support for The Arab Spring -- the Tunisian government had just been overthrown one month earlier on 1/14/2011 and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak had just resigned three days earlier on 2/11/2011.

The day following The Day of Rage, protests broke out in Benghazi against Libya’s President Muammar Qaddafi.

Question 2

What was The Green Revolution?

Answer 2

Please see Q&A-9 through Q&A-11.

Question 3

Was The Green Revolution part of The Arab Spring?

Answer 3

Although Iran’s Green Revolution started nearly two years earlier (6/13/2009) and had finally been extinguished almost exactly one year earlier (2/11/2010), and although Persian Iran is NOT Arab, the leaders of The Green Revolution proclaimed 2/14/2011 as The Day of Rage in support for The Arab Spring.

Although The Day of Rage featured demonstrations throughout Iran for a full year, none of them “held a candle” to the events of The Green Revolution itself, and the leaders of The Green Revolution have been under house arrest ever since.

Question 4

Does our author discuss Iran? Or Iran’s Green Revolution? Or the relationship of Iran’s Green Revolution to The Arab Spring which she discusses in detail?

Answer 4

No – no – no.

Question 5

Is Iran Persian or Arab? Do its citizens speak Arabic or Farsi? Is Iran closer culturally, ethnically, etc., to Arab countries than other Asian countries such as Islam’s largest country, Indonesia?

Answer 5

Iran is Persian, NOT Arab.

Iran’s citizens speak Farsi.

Persian Iran was conquered in the mid-1000’s by the Seljuk Turks who swept in from Russian Turkestan and Chinese Turkestan.

Accordingly, Persian Iran is no closer culturally, ethnically, etc., to Arab countries than Turkey.

The Ottoman Turks 250 years after the Seljuk Turks, also swept in from Russian Turkestan and Chinese Turkestan, but settled in modern-day Turkey. Like the Seljuk Turks before them had conquered and ruled the Arab countries for 250 years, the Ottoman Turks conquered and ruled the Arab countries for 600 years.

But just like Persian Iran is NOT Arab and does NOT speak Arabic, Turkey is also NOT Arab and does NOT speak Arabic.

[Neither Iran nor Turkey, of course, is a member of the 22-country Arab League.]

However, the question asked how Persian Iran compares with Indonesia (Islam’s largest country in terms of population) vis-à-vis Arab countries -- culturally, ethnically, etc., etc.

An excellent case could be made that Persian Iran is NO CLOSER than Indonesia to Arab countries in terms of anything EXCEPT GEOGRAPHY.

Question 6

Who was/is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Answer 6

Please see Q&A-7 through Q&A-9.

Question 7

Was Ahmadinejad the leader of the Tehran students who, on the heels of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, captured the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on 11/4/1979 and held for 444 days most of the 66 American diplomat/citizen hostages -- and then released them on 1/20/1981 at the exact moment Ronald Reagan completed his 20-minute Inaugural Address in order to avoid giving Reagan an excuse to invade Iran and overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Answer 7

Yes.

Question 8

Was Ahmadinejad the President of Iran 2005-2013?

Answer 8

Yes.

When he was first elected President in 2005, the U.S. Government decided to ignore the insult that had been intended by Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in authorizing Ahmadinejad to run for election -- by “turning the other cheek” and falsely claiming that Ahmadinejad had not been the leader of the students who captured our Tehran Embassy in 1979.

Question 9

Was Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 6/12/2009 fraudulent? Was that the cause of The Green Revolution?

Answer 9

International observers universally viewed the election as fraudulent for a wide variety of reasons -- such as (1) the announcement of the results only 2 hours after the polls closed in a nation of 80 million people occupying an area more than three times the size of Texas and California combined, and (2) the unbelievably high recorded voter turnout including two provinces where the turnout WAS MORE THAN 100%!!!

In one sense, the fraudulent election was the start of The Green Revolution, which began the day after the election (6/13/2009).

However, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (to whom all police and military forces report) clamped down hard immediately.

And at Friday Prayers on 6/19/2009 (Friday is Islam’s Holy Day), Khamenei proclaimed that the official results were a “divine assessment” and announced that there would be no further protests.

However, the next day a young female protester, Nega Ahga-Soltan, was shot on Kargar Avenue in Tehran and died in front of numerous cameras.

The videos of her dying went viral and The Green Revolution was on in earnest.

Question 10

Did The Green Revolution involve millions of protesters in more than 3 dozen Iranian cities and last for more than 8 months?

Answer 10

Yes.

Question 11

Was it brutally put down, primarily by the Supreme Leader’s Revolutionary Guards with mass arrests accompanied by torture and rape of those arrested, putting internet and other communications out of commission, etc., etc.?

Answer 11

Yes.

Question 12

Was the effectiveness of such tactics enhanced by the memory that following a 1988 attack by The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the summary execution of 30,000 prisoners?

Answer 12

Yes.

By way of background, Iran and Iraq fought a knock-down drag-out war 1980-1988 initiated by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran on 9/22/1980.

[Yours Truly, incidentally, was in Saudi Arabia several times during the war as Senior Tax Counsel and Director of Worldwide Tax Planning for Texaco which, together with Exxon, Chevron and Mobil, owned 100% of Aramco which, in turn, owned 100% of all of the oil & gas in Saudi Arabia. In addition to being the world’s largest oil company, Aramco was also the world’s largest airline -- because it operated passenger aircraft all over the Kingdom to transport all of its own personnel and the personnel of contractors, shareholders, etc. The planes queued up like Manhattan buses and all you had to do was show an Aramco/contractor/shareholder ID and the ride was free and you could go wherever you wanted. Several times I went up to Safaniya on the Kuwaiti border to watch the Iran-Iraq war explosions on the night horizon from 80 miles away.]

The People’s Mujahedin of Iran fought AGAINST Iran on the side of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The war between Iran and Iraq ended on 8/20/1988 pursuant to a U.N.-brokered peace agreement.

HOWEVER, The People’s Mujahedin of Iran took the view that the peace agreement did NOT apply to them. Accordingly, they persevered AFTER 8/20/1988 with a major attack involving 7,000 Mujahedin troops.

It was in response to the continued Mujahedin hostilities that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the summary killing of the 30,000 Mujahedin that had been captured during the war and were still in Iranian jails.

Question 13

Does the President of Iran have any power or is he (there has never been a female candidate for President) merely a puppet of The Supreme Leader?

Answer 13

The President of Iran has so little power that it is often joked that he does not even have authority to go to the men’s room without permission.

And that the President is nothing more than a scapegoat to be blamed for anything that might cause The Regime to become unpopular -- and then be summarily dismissed by The Supreme Leader.

Article 110 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran gives The Supreme Leader the power, among other things, (1) to control the Armed Forces and The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, (2) to control all of the media including radio and television, (3) to declare war and to declare peace, (4) to appoint judges and to fire them, and (5) to decide who is permitted to run for President in the every-four-years election for the Scapegoat-In-Waiting.

The Supreme Leader is appointed (Article 107 of the Constitution) by The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts.

Although The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts comprises 82-88 Islamic theologians who are popularly elected for 8-year terms (The Fourth Assembly 2007-2015 is currently in office), it is NOT clear what function they serve other than to elect The Supreme Leader of which there have only been two = Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (12/3/1979–6/3/1989) and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (6/4/1989-present).

[So it would appear that the Second, Third and Fourth Assemblies of (Islamic) Experts have had nothing to do.]

However, in this regard, Article 111 of the Constitution gives The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts the power to dismiss The Supreme Leader if he “becomes incapable of fulfilling his constitutional duties, or loses one of the qualifications mentioned in Articles 5 and 109, or it becomes known that he did not possess some of the qualifications initially.”

And at the beginning of The Green Revolution, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani who was then (and still is) the Chairman of The Fourth Assembly of (Islamic) Experts, was reported in The London Guardian on 6/21/2009 (the day after pictures of the killing of a young female protestor on a Tehran street went viral) as attempting to assemble an emergency meeting of The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts in order to depose The Supreme Leader.

However, The London Guardian article also reported that several members of The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts had been given house arrest and had been cut off from communication.

And the same day (6/21/2009), The Tehran Times claimed that The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts had expressed strong support for The Supreme Leader.

It is probably worthwhile digressing for a moment to recall that Stalin is famously reported to have asked sarcastically: “How many (army) divisions does the Pope have?”

[Though reports of the occasion and setting of the reported question vary widely -- which could be explained (Yours Truly’s own theory) by Stalin asking the question frequently!!!]

The reason for the digression???

Because one can just imagine Iran’s Supreme Leader, at any time and frequently from the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran into the distant future, asking himself “How many divisions does The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts have?” and proceeding to clap any of its troublesome members under house arrest as he did in 2009.

Yours Truly has tried unsuccessfully to ascertain who determines who is permitted to run in the every-8-years elections to The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts -- similarly to how The Supreme Leader determines pursuant to Article 110 of the Constitution, who is permitted to run for election every 4 years for the office of President.

[I would be willing to take even money bets on either of two propositions -- (1) The Supreme Leader decides who can run for The Assembly of (Islamic) Experts, and (2) for the next election, none of the troublemakers from 6/20/2009 will be permitted to run. Any takers???]

Question 14

Did President Obama do anything more than offer a few words in support for The Green Revolution?

Answer 14

No. As a result of which he was severely criticized by the spokesperson for Mir-Hossein Mousavi (please see the next Q&A).

Question 15

Did the Spokesperson for Mir-Hossein Mousavi (the main opposition candidate in the 2009 election who, incidentally, had been Prime Minister of Iran 1981-1989, and who refused to accept the results of the 2009 Presidential election and instead created/led The Green Revolution) criticize President Obama’s claim that the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi “may not be as great as has been advertised” with some choice comments in an interview for Foreign Policy Magazine?

Answer 15

Since Mousavi could not speak to the non-Iranian press, Foreign Policy Magazine interviewed what FPM called “his external spokesman, renowned filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf.”

He criticized President Obama’s claim with the retort: “Does he like it himself [when someone is] saying that there is no difference between Obama and [George W.] Bush?” (quoting from the Foreign Policy Magazine Interview currently still available at foreignpolicy.com/2009/06/18/the-fp-interview-mohsen-makhmalbaf.)

Question 16

So, getting back to Q-1, did Mir-Houssein Mousavi and The Green Revolution proclaim 2/14/2011 as The Day of Rage in support of The Arab Spring?

Answer 16

Yes.

Question 17

Has Mousavi been under house arrest ever since?

Answer 17

Yes.

It would appear that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would prefer to hold him incommunicado for the rest of his life rather than risk another revolutionary spark such as the 6/20/2009 death of the young female protester on the streets of Iran, the pictures of which went viral causing The Green Revolution itself to go viral.

Question 18

And wasn’t Ahmadinejad ineligible to run in the 2013 Presidential election?

Answer 18

Having proclaimed Ahmadinejad’s 2009 re-election a “divine assessment” the day before the killing of the young female protester (please see Q&A-9), The Supreme Leader presumably wanted to avoid firing Ahmadinejad if The Green Revolution could be suppressed in any other way.

And The Supreme Leader was eventually spared the embarrassment of revoking the “divine assessment” when Ahmadinejad was barred from running for re-election in 2013 by the term limits of Article 114 of the Constitution.

Question 19

Since Ahmadinejad’s apparent unpopularity in 2009 was due to a great extent to his treatment of farmers, isn’t the effectiveness of the Supreme Leader’s actions to neutralize the threat of The Green Revolution reminiscent of how Stalin dealt with the mortal threat to the Soviet Union caused by the failure of his farm-collectivization program in the 1930’s to enable Stalinism to flourish in the USSR for another 55 years?

Answer 19

As we have studied many times in the past, Lenin established the Soviet Union’s Gulags as a machine to kill 7 million/year of the aristocracy and the intelligentsia.

And when Stalin succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924, Stalin was delighted to go on killing his own enemies at the rate of 7 million/year.

Especially when the Soviet Union was on the brink of starvation in the 1930’s as a result of peasant resistance to Stalin’s farm-collectivization program.

Stalin’s solution???

Feed the peasants into the Gulag killing machine and order 15 million city dwellers to Kazakhstan to begin farming there, so that the Soviet Union wouldn’t starve after all.

[For history lovers, there was an official census in the 1930’s that was able to find only 130 million inhabitants -- which was 50 million FEWER THAN the 180 million estimate that had been made EVEN TAKING INTO ACCOUNT the millions that Stalin’s Gulags were known to have killed. In other words, Stalin had killed 50 million more people than anyone had thought in their wildest imaginations!!! The next Gulag victims??? The census takers!!! Seriously!!!]

So if Stalinism could survive for 55 years after that catastrophe, why can’t Iran’s Supreme Leader (who will effectively anoint his successor, etc., ad infinitum) survive for all eternity the 2009 “speed bump”???

Question 20

So if Stalinism could survive an even worse catastrophe for 55 years, why do we hear the Obama Administration constantly saying that it doesn’t matter if Iran acquires nuclear weapons and it doesn’t matter if Persian Iran conquers its Arab neighbors militarily because Iran will become a civilized nation in 10-15 years?

Answer 20

Is 10-15 years the Obama Administration’s estimate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s remaining life expectancy???

And even if it is their estimate (who knows???), why is the Obama Administration so naïve that it would believe for a moment that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would effectively anoint as his successor anyone different from himself and his only predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini???

After all, President Obama’s claim that the difference between the leader of Iran’s Green Revolution, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “may not be as great as has been advertised” was accurate in at least one respect.

The point on which Mousavi and Ahmadinejad agreed???

That Iran’s nuclear program should proceed full speed ahead!!!

Question 21

And, as we have studied many times in the past, won’t such a policy [the Obama Administration constantly saying that it doesn’t matter if Iran acquires nuclear weapons and it doesn’t matter if Persian Iran conquers its Arab neighbors militarily because Iran will become a civilized nation in 10-15 years] force Egypt, Turkey and The Gulf State Six (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, The United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman) to EACH acquire nuclear weapons AS EACH HAS ALREADY ANNOUNCED IT WILL DO AS SOON AS IRAN GOES NUCLEAR? And that the incessant threats to annihilate various countries issued by Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei indicate that he will probably start a nuclear war in no time flat? And that since virtually all of the world’s agricultural fertilizers come from petrochemicals and since 50% of the world’s oil & gas comes from the Persian Gulf or downwind from the P.G., 50% of the world’s 7 billion population will probably become unsustainable overnight?

Answer 21

Yes – yes – yes.

Question 22

So why do you think that our author turned a blind eye to Iran?

Answer 22

What do you think??? Let’s discuss.

Question 23

And how do you think the themes of her book apply to Iran?

Answer 23

Partial answer (but let’s discuss) --

Q&A-4 of the First Short Quiz reported that for our author, the key piece of advice in Nizam al-Mulk’s Styasat Nameh (Book of Politics) was know your subjects through direct, personal contact insofar as possible -- avoid intermediaries since the use of intermediaries will always produce corruption which will cause you to be hated, since you will be blamed for the actions of YOUR intermediaries.

And Q&A-6 of the First Short Quiz questioned why our author had frequently criticized the crony that Afghan President Hamid Karzei had appointed to run Kandahar where our author had lived for a decade.

Without ever stopping to think how utterly ridiculous it had been for the American authors of Afghanistan’s Constitution to provide that the President should appoint local governors with the approval of the National Assembly!!!

Rather than providing that local governors would be popularly elected so that they would be the intermediaries of the local population, rather than the national government’s intermediaries!!!

For anyone who has read this far, you will recognize the wisdom of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran in providing that the Iranian President (aka the scapegoat-in-waiting) will be popularly elected so that he is the intermediary of the people rather than The Supreme Leader’s intermediary!!!