Posts tagged : "Asia politics"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s presidential election campaign has commenced in earnest, with seven Guardian Council-approved candidates vying to replace President Hassan Rouhani after his eight-year tenure. The 12-member Guardian Council, tasked with vetting and filtering candidates in elections, eliminated 585 other aspirants, many of them seen as moderate and pro-reform, narrowing the field to a handful of known conservatives. Chief among them is Ebrahim Raisi, the Islamic Republic’s Chief Justice known for his anti-Western views. He is widely viewed as the frontrunner in a field of candidates critics say has failed to capture the public’s imagination. Polling day is June 18. Distinguished pragmatist figures who...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: A convoluted conflict that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen is now in its seventh year, with a staggering death toll of more than 100,000 and dire economic repercussions that have made life in the most impoverished Arab nation additionally painful. International efforts to extinguish the conflict have so far made little success and humanitarian assistance is supplied with great difficulty. Nearly 24 million Yemenis, constituting four fifths of the entire population, require urgent humanitarian aid. A child dies every 10 minutes due to malnutrition or disease, and the country’s health sector, reeling from a massive loss of human capital and demolition of infrastructure,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s top envoy has backpedaled on remarks he made privately in a taped oral history about the country’s hardline Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and his ministry’s lack of real influence over the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. But while Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has made waves locally by claiming US-slain IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani interfered in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), his revelations on Russia’s bid to scupper the 2015 nuclear deal could have a greater political impact. The Donald Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran that have since strangled its economy. But momentum is slowly but surely building towards a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: After dragging their feet on how to kick off the elusive process of resurrecting the moribund Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iranian government and the Biden administration are now involved in a fresh round of diplomatic efforts to sew up the full compliance of all parties with the deal terms. The Austrian capital Vienna is hosting delegations from Iran and six world powers, moderated by the European Union, where shuttle diplomacy and painstaking negotiations to revive the debilitated Iran deal started on Tuesday and are expected to continue until Friday. Iran, the trio of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as China and Russia, meet at the Grand Hotel Vienna. The US...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s was one of the most traumatic episodes of the 20th century for Iranians. While a new governmental system was being crystallized in a turbulent social context in the wake of a revolution, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein waged an all-out internecine war against his fragile neighbor, inflicted unspeakable human suffering on the people of Iran and razed the country’s infrastructure to the ground. The goal was to nip the fledgling Islamist movement spearheaded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the bud and prevent revolutionary Iran from emerging as a force of hostility against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf region and the alliance of Western powers. Described as...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: A group of MPs in Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament, or Majlis, have proposed legislation that if implemented as worded will spark new conflict and crisis in the Middle East. One year after Iran’s hero-worshipped military commander, Qasem Soleimani, was eliminated by a US drone strike in Baghdad, a group of Iranian lawmakers has proposed an idiosyncratic parliamentary motion in 16 articles obligating the government to retaliate the killing by laying the groundwork for the “annihilation” of Israel by 2041. At the helm of Iran’s parliament sits Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander now in plainclothes. Out of the 290 parliamentarians...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the sun sets on America’s costly 18-year war in Afghanistan, neighboring Iran is poised to gain an upper hand as foreign troops chart their withdrawal from the war-ravaged country. That is despite Tehran’s vehement vocal objections to a nascent peace deal between the US and Islamic fundamentalist Taliban group aimed at ending a war that by some estimates has cost American taxpayers nearly US$2 trillion. In February, US President Donald Trump’s administration and the Taliban reached a conditional agreement following nine rounds of intense negotiations in the Qatari capital of Doha. The deal covers four key issues: a sustainable ceasefire, facilitation of intra-Afghan talks now underway...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The November 27 assassination of an elite Iranian nuclear scientist, almost unanimously blamed on Israel’s intelligence apparatus, has put the Middle East on high alert and raises the specter of a military confrontation that will scupper any chance of a fast thaw in Iran-US diplomacy when US President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a brigadier general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a lecturer in physics at Imam Hossein University and one of the most senior scientists in Iran’s multilayered, sophisticated nuclear enterprise. Some have referred to him as the Abdul Qadeer Khan of Iran, the “father” of Pakistan’s clandestine and ultimately...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Reports that US President Donald Trump consulted senior aides about military attack options on Iran has raised speculation that a new destabilizing conflict could be imminent in the twilight of his tumultuous term. Trump reportedly backed away from launching a strike when confronted with the scenarios such a hit would likely set in motion. But there are still concerns the lame-duck president may fire parting salvos at his Iranian adversary, leaving behind a conflict for his rival President-elect Joe Biden to untangle. Trump raised the strike option in a November 12 meeting at the Oval Office with his top-tier cabinet members, namely Vice-President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: As the world was mesmerized by the spectacle of the presidential race in the United States, attention was diverted from other headline-making issues, at least fleetingly. In particular, it looks as though the dust has settled on the latest civilizational clash between the West and the Islamic world following the reprinting of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo and the brutal murder of Samuel Paty, a French middle-school teacher who had shown the cartoons in one of his classes. A debate on the appropriateness of republishing the controversial cartoons, the degree to which they caused offense to Muslims worldwide, the sanctity of freedom of speech in a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran was overtaken with merriment and relief when the long-awaited nuclear deal was inked in July 2015 by the Islamic Republic and six world powers, spelling a happy ending to a diplomatic impasse that had been an unnerving fixture of media headlines and an unvarying talking point of world leaders for nearly two decades. Iran was extricated from the bludgeoning sanctions that had maimed its economy and turned it into a hermit kingdom, and the international community obtained robust assurances that Tehran’s nuclear program would not deviate toward weaponization. A genuine diplomatic breakthrough was clinched, and then-US president Barack Obama lauded it as “the strongest non-proliferation agreement...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s all-male Guardian Council, after four decades of barring women from the presidency, has reversed course to allow women to run in 2021. The step has been largely welcomed as a positive sign by women’s rights advocates, although the constitutional watchdog tasked with overseeing Iran’s electoral process screens all candidates’ eligibility for elected government positions. In a press conference on October 10, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesperson of the ultra-conservative body, which operates under the aegis of the Supreme Leader, surprised reporters by saying there was no prohibition on women running for the presidency in next year’s elections. No explicit legal provision blocked...