ScoopDaily Email Alerts /
Want to write for Scoop? Apply Now
Till Thursday Do Us Part
MoJo looks into the Shia religious tradition of sigheh, or temporary marriage.
Remarkably, Iran’s Shiite clerics not only tolerate sigheh, but actively promote it as an important element of the country’s official religion. “Temporary marriages must be bravely promoted,” the interior minister said at a clerical conference in Qom in 2007. “Islam is in no way indifferent to the needs of a 15-year-old youth in whom God has placed the sex drive.” Yet the Iranian mullahs’ efforts to rehabilitate sigheh have met a stubborn core of resistance—particularly from feminists, who decry the practice as a kind of “Islamic prostitution.”
Popularity: 7% [?]
Open Source Counterinsurgency
It looks like Iran’s success at quelling each iteration of the Green Revolution might stem from their adherence to Western-developed counterinsurgency theory. While the prevailing thought-leaders recommend a butter over guns approach in dealing with established insurgencies such as those America faces in Iraq, they advocate an ‘early recognition of [. . .] and harsh decisive response” to so-called embryonic ones:
First, the regime appears to have developed good intelligence on the opposition. The opposition movement appears broad, but scattered, disorganized, and probably lacking many internal security measures.
Second, Cox’s research of the Western COIN theorists suggests the importance of early coercive countermeasures against the opposition. According to the New York Times, the security services have arrested more than a thousand people over the past two months, including scores of journalists, a variety of activists, relatives of opposition leaders, and others.
Finally, Galula and
…
Popularity: 1% [?]
Lunch Reading
Nom nom nom:
1. Talking Points Memo has a good wire on the healthcare debate.
2. A Seton Hall Law School study has forced to the surface some unexplained and fishy details behind the ruled suicides of three Guantánamo inmates in 2006.
3. Not surprisingly–and definitely rightfully–Iranian students are using their national Students Day to protest the Ahmedinejad regime. Police aren’t big fans of this, and are bloodying people up “with a brutality not seen since the summer” in response
4. Wonk Room discusses whether the new hot-item public option substitute is any good.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Playing the Waiting Game
Today marks the date of the 2009 autumnal equinox. That’s right, summer will officially be over.
Many of us were stuck at home all summer as our vacation accounts were drained to pay bills instead. With September in full swing, temperatures in places like Arizona still hover around 100 degrees. Baseball – the sport of summer – still has two weeks of its regular season left. And I haven’t seen a single Halloween decoration yet (shocking!).
A grueling, endless summer it has been.
In addition, the notoriously slow August news cycles have been stretched forth. Now that every single celebrity imaginable has died, there has been nothing but low-caliber, partisan health care rhetoric coverage, some random comments on the Afghanistan situation and a few straggling cries for justice from Iran. Hell, the top headline from last week came from MTV’s Video Music Awards. (In fact, I would have finished …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Obama Confronts Iran
Iran has undergone what amounts to a military coup, and that means that President Obama will have to rethink how to deal with the new Iranian political realities, Middle East experts told Scoop44.
The use of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Iran’s post-election crackdown has led to a growing belief among experts like author Reza Aslan that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is a puppet of the military.
“There’s no doubt that what we saw was an out-and-out coup,” said Aslan, “I’m certain Revolutionary Guard was behind voter fraud. They now control the intelligence and other key infrastructure of the government.”
Obama will be avoiding any face time with Ahmedinejad that might legitimize his controversial election when he speaks before his first U.N. General Assembly Wednesday, announced U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice.
“I don’t expect that they will have a direct engagement,” Rice told reporters Friday. “I think …
Popularity: 1% [?]
