A piece I probably didn't need to write
When I first blogged about the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari on the day of her arrest (May 10th, 2007), I suggested that the arrest arose from domestic (Iranian) cause(s), rather than the nuclear brinksmanship played enthusiastically by the matched pair of idiots -- Bush and Ahmadinejad. There is competition between Ahmadinejad's faction and Rafsanjani's (and/or Khatami's) faction(s), which can be acted out by proxies, using Anglo-American aligned Iranian exiles and expats.
Then there's the substantive issue raised by the association of the National Endowment for Democracy, established by law on November 23rd, 1983, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Reasoning by analogy can be misleading, but the NED has a track record as an instrument of national policy, in particular against the regimes currently in place in Cuba and Venezuela.
Juan Cole's take on her arrest and release and mine differ, for several reasons. I simply don't see this as a black-and-white issue, nor even one that is better viewed as a proxy for the Anglo-American vs Islamic Republic struggle for intellectual and diplomatic market share. However, your milage may vary.
Here are the original, and translated into Farsi texts, of Hernando Calvo Ospina's piece that ran in the July issue of Le Monde Diplomatique. Quand une respectable fondation prend le relais de la CIA and Farsi text. Enjoy.
