White Balloon

Daily Journal of Mahaan, an Iranian-American student residing in USA.

Monday, January 31, 2005

My First Reader!

Tonight I got my blog's first real reader. A lot people had checked this blog before probably because of the keyword matches in search engines or through hoder's site for Iranian English blogs. But my first comment from a reader appeared tonite after about a year of writing :) Anyway good to hear from KL, a reader with Indian origin. She posted the following question regarding my posting about US-Iran relation:

"Do you really think that if Iran doesn't talk to America, the Neo-Cons will use some pretext to attack Iran? My knowledge says "No," because America has bases in Afghanishtan, Central Asian countries, Kuwait, etc. and Iran can easily access those countries using missiles. Also, Iran can target Saudi Arabia or Israel, and I don't think USA wants that."

And here is what I think: Regarding those military sites in the Persian gulf, centeral Asia, etc: I agree with KL that attacking Iran will create a lot of mess in the region and of course it won't be an easy one like Iraq. Iran with its capabilities will be able to do some harm to US interests in the region. US is quite aware of that, but at the same time we should know that the existence of all those military sites in the region is to cover the military interst of US. I mean that US has put those sites there mainly for a situation like this to minimize its loss in a full scale war. The same thing happened in the case of Iraq and Iraq practically didn't do anything to US bases in Qatar of Saudi or Kuwait. Most of these sites were formed (at least in their current extended form) after the 1979 revolution in Iran when US missed its 2nd best ally in the region (Iran) and there was a serious sense of anxiety in US about the spread of Khomeini's radical revolutionary ideas into the region. So at the first place these military sites are there for any form of US militaristic involvement in the region including dealing with Iran and I don't think US really cares that much if Iran does some random shooting to their sites, because US easily answers it with 100 times more severe attacks. The same way that Saddam didn't dare to answer any of the bombings that US and UK did between 1992-2000.

But again I repeat that the danger of attacking Iran for US is beyond a military battle field. It can totally destaiblizes the middl east and central asia as whole and creates a mess which will be definitely worse than the current mess in Iraq. And I should say as an Iranian that I'm very optimist that my country gets out of this spotlight very soon. It's quite scary and the last thing that I want to see in my life is another war for my country and our world.

Thanks KL for visiting and please come back :)


PS: Relevant to this discussion, last week Thomas Fridman of NY Times had an editorial about US-Iran relation.

Sideways

Sideways (2004) Poster

Sideways directed by Alexander Payne is a sincere and very down to the earth movie (exactly like its main character). The movie is the story an average progressive and dynamic personality with all his naiveness, humbleness, sense of humanity and his ongoing struggle to keep his possitive personality in a world that others with totally different qualities might rule easier. Paul Giamatti who acts as Mile in this movie, does a superb job with his consistent performance. Actually his performance is the major factor which kept me very focused for the whole 2 hours. Unbelievable that he's not at least nominated for the academy awards. Anyway, people like Mile are around us and many of us share a lot of similarities in our characteristics and daily life with them. Hope all of them end up with fairly good endings after all of the sideways that they go through.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Now I'm going to use Haloscan's commenting and trackback.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

In the 10th anniversary of the death of Mr. Mehdi Bazargan someone quoted him: "Iranian people are generally patient in dealing with tyrranies, but as soon as there is a chance of hope in the horizen, they become quite hasty."

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

USA future policy on Iran

It's confusing to predict how is the new American Policy going to be under Bush's 2nd term. From one side we hear voices of moderation from Rice about the multilateral foreign policy with emphasis on tuning with Europeans. On the other side there are all these reports about the ongoing Pentagon's effort in plans to do premptive attacks againts Iranian facilities. One thing is clear that America can not afford any military option for Iran at least for another year. Iraq is seriously a mess these days and in spite of all the propaganda about the electio, there is going to be a selection of parliment and generally the country is far from a unity government. And that's what exactly Iranian regime will benefit from. But in a year when the election is over in Iran (with most probably a centerist-right new Iranian president), Iran has to start talking to US, otherwise the military wing of neo-conservatives in Pentagon are really countng down to get their hands dirty in Iran.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Warning to Saeed Mortezavi

This letter is a group protest by Iranian bloggers (including myself) against the attorney general of Tehran justice department: Saeed Mortezavi. Mortezavi who reports directly to Khameneie has spent all his efforts in limiting the freedom of speech in Iran. As the result of his efforts over 80 publications (newspaper, magazine, etc.) has been banned and recently he's changed his focused on weblogs. The main message of the letter which is written in Farsi is a serious warning to Mortezavi about the recent arrests and torture and finally stalinistic TV applogy of some of Iranian blogger because of their semi-political weblogs. The Iranians bloggers are requesting Mortezavi to stop such a practice, otherwise they are going to start a world wide informative campaign against Iranian judiciary.




 
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