Are Bush administration Iran hawks keeping pro-democracy Iranian reformers out of the U.S.?

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: March 1, 2007
How the U.S. Ignored Iran's Reformers
Posted by Scott MacLeod

The Bush administration, despite President Bush's vocal call for democracy in Iran, has failed to grant visas to several prominent Iranian pro-democracy activists. Among the Iranians still waiting for a U.S. visa is Abdolkarim Soroush, a philosopher who is widely regarded as the leading intellectual force behind the reformist movement that swept President Mohammed Khatami to power in 1997.

After being tipped by an Iranian source and looking into the issue, I learned that another important figure whose visa request was rejected outright is Ebrahim Yazdi, head of the Freedom Movement of Iran. Despite being under severe pressure from hard-liners aligned with Khatami's successor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Soroush and Yazdi sought to visit the U.S. in part to take up speaking invitations at prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Stanford universities.

Soroush, who is presently a visiting scholar at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told me that he applied for his visa at the U.S. embassy in Berlin in June 2006 and did not have any knowledge about why it had not yet been approved....Yazdi, a pharmacist by training, learned that his application for a U.S. visa, which he initially submitted to the U.S. embassy Paris in 2005, was denied....(An explanation given by the State Department) seems an oddly bureaucratic explanation considering the Bush administration's big rhetoric advocating freedom in Iran....

It may be that the U.S. government bureaucracy hasn't caught up with the White House's freedom agenda for Iran. But several Iranian reformists I spoke with--in Iran and in the U.S.--believed that hard-liners in the Bush administration may be blocking the visa applications for political reasons. Their feeling is that the hard-liners might be doing everything to discourage dialogue with Iranians, even reformists, lest it complicate their their agenda of confronting Iran. They also fear that administration hard-liners may not be interested in giving a platform inside the U.S. to the views of Iranians like Soroush and Yazdi who are dissidents but don't buy Bush's confrontational approach to Iran....

http://time-blog.com/middle_east/2007/03/how_the_us_ignored_irans_refor.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

[FrenchieCat]

1. Bush talks out of all sides of his mouth.....

and they do nothing right....not a goddamn thing! so, what else is new? :shrug:

[Eugene]

2. From the Guardian blog...

Masoud Golsorkhi

Selective reading

Neocon intellectuals only promote the Iranian voices that suit their
political agenda. Does that remind you of anything - Iraq, say?

March 2, 2007 2:30 PM

-snip-

If we take the new empire's desk generals at their word and believe in their support
for the cause of Iranians' democratic ambitions, it would be natural to assume that
they would want to celebrate and encourage its principal actors. The fact that there
is an internal democratic opposition is something of an inconvenience to the neocon
agenda of "bomb first, ask questions later".

The inconvenient truth is that not only there is a viable homegrown democratic
movement, campaigning on everything from the environment to workers and women's
rights and to freedom of expression, but also it is a fact that women staff these
groups disproportionately.

-snip-

Shirin Ebadi is a remarkable woman whose bravery and steadfastness for the cause of
freedom for all Iranians - men as well as women - is well documented. She is remarkable
but not unique. The problem is that the indigenous movement for democratic change
does not conform to the templates favoured by the neocons.

Shirin and her like don't make good pin-ups for the neocon agenda because she is no
smouldering, dark-eyed Lolita; she isn't as sexy because she isn't simple. In fact, she
is quite complicated: a former judge, and the country's most celebrated human rights
lawyer, she has tasted prison herself. She isn't sexy because her criticism of the system
in Iran isn't within the terms of the new imperialists' agenda. Most of all, she isn't sexy
because she isn't asking US to bomb her country to pieces or slaughter her menfolk.
She is on record as saying she will defend her country against foreign aggression.
Her opposition to the regime doesn't extend to the importation of Iraqi-style democracy
- she is at once fighting traditional patriarchal sexism of formalised into institutional
oppression, and the external aggression and ambitions of the imperialists.

-snip-

Full article: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/masoud_golsorkhi/2007/03/reading_lolita_or_listening_to.html