Day: June 16, 2013
Shpend responds to Ed
Shpend Ahmeti of “Self-Determination” responds to my SAIS colleague Ed Joseph’s memo, which peacefare.net published last week:
MEMO
To: Edward Joseph
From: Shpend Ahmeti; Prishtina, Kosova
Date: 16 June, 2013
Subject: Five Replies to Edward Joseph from VETEVENDOSJE!
Thank you very much for your letter and your advice. We had a very good visit to the United States where we were able to present our views and program to our diaspora, universities, senate and congress members, State Department and others. The SAIS debate was a very interesting and useful forum to test our ideas. We certainly hope that the debate will be posted online so that more people will be able to watch it.
As a movement, we are open to comments, criticism, and questions. We believe that debate will only help us strengthen our program, our concept and our movement in general. We have been called all kinds of names, but rarely do we see criticism that tries to directly answer our argumentation.
We have duly noted your five points which you more or less argued during the SAIS debate. In my memo, I have tried to summarize our arguments that we also made during the debate. The explanation will hopefully explain why some of the premises you make are unacceptable to us.
For your information, your memo was presented in some of the local media (close to government) in Kosovo as the official position of US government, which they would not say even when members of government would speak. Read more
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Stunning
Hassan Rouhani’s first-round win in Friday’s Iranian presidential election is stunning. It is no mean feat to reach 50% against five other candidates. The celebrations in Tehran make clear that his constituency included those reformists who voted–though presumably others boycotted. But he must have had a much broader constituency than just the committed reformists. Iranians seem to want to change their country’s relations with the West.
If, like me, you are trying to absorb what this means for Iran, the United States, and the nuclear issues that have plagued the relationship between the two, the best read I’ve seen so far today is from our SAIS dean, Vali Nasr. He notes the that Rouhani will have to convince the Supreme Leader to compromise on nuclear issues and underlines that the US will have to offer serious sanctions relief to get anything like what it wants. The ball, he says, is in Washington’s court. Read more
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