Getting Iran Wrong

When making a revolution, allies matter. So do enemies. If you can’t identify your friends and target your enemies, you’re better advised to do nothing.

And that is just what our enemies hope we will do.

Washington Post reporter Karl Vick, reporting from Tehran this week, trumpeted that the new U.S. strategy to help pro-democracy groups inside Iran “could backfire,” by tainting activists as American agents.

“We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush,” he triumphantly quotes an Iranian “human rights activist” as saying.

The only problem is, the “human rights activists” and “pro-democracy” folks Karl Vick quotes are nothing of the sort. They are members of the discredited “reformist” movement, which ruled Iran from 1989 until last year.

The reformist movement is not happy with the election of Iran’s current president, Revolutionary Guards officer and former Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their candidate was Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who as Majles speaker in 1986 launched Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, then lavished it with money during his eight years as president from 1989-1997.

The only change the reformists want to see is an end to Iran’s isolation and to U.S.-led sanctions, so the regime can be free to develop nuclear weapons in peace. In other words, they are a shill for the regime.

America’s enemies are very eager for us to get it wrong. And the Islamic Republic of Iran is a sophisticated enemy. Their intelligence services were trained by the KGB at the height of the Cold War. We should never forget that.

The Soviets mastered the use of “active measures,” aimed at planting disinformatzia and bogus stories to discredit the enemy, and maskirovka, strategic deception. They taught those techniques to the Islamist intelligence service in the early 1980s. Iran’s conspiracy-minded clerics and spymasters turned out to be star pupils.

Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright fell for Iran’s strategic deception campaigns repeatedly. So did the Europeans, who believed all during the 1990s they could engage in “constructive engagement” with a regime whose sole goal was to acquire European technology to build better missiles and nuclear weapons.

Today, the Washington Post is falling for it, too. They are following the lead of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which in 1997 allowed a newly-created “surrogate” Radio Free Iran to be transformed into “Radio Khatami.” (Known officially as Radio Farda (“Tomorrow”), the radio got its nickname because of its sycophantic treatment of Rafsanjani’s “reformist” successor, Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammad Khatami.)

It’s absolutely critical that we get Iran right. On one side, we have a fake Iranian “resistance” group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which has jinned up a massive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. They are hoping to convince Congress to get the administration to lift the State Department’s designation of the group, which dates from 1994, as an international terrorist organization.

“Imagine the message that would send to the Iranian people,” one administration official who is appalled at the MEK lobbying efforts told me. “So we’re telling them they should be ruled by some crazy terrorist cult?” As I reported recently, the MEK helped bring Khomeini to power in 1979, but had a falling out two years later over how to share power. Call them Iran’s Trotskyists, if you will.

On the other hand, you have the “reformists,” the Rafsanjani-Khatami clique that ruled Iran until just last year. On their watch, regime intelligence officers brutally hacked to death the leading anti-regime activist in Iran, Darioush Forouhar, and his wife, Parvaneh. They sent out hit squads that murdered more than 200 Iranian dissidents overseas. They murdered Iranian journalists, tortured Iranian students, closed universities, and machine-gunned demonstrators.

And yet, the Washington Post calls members of this failed “reform” movement “human rights activists.”

So, apparently, did the State Department, misled as ever by the Council on Foreign Relations and its acolytes. State careerists chose self-styled “reformists” to take part in workshops aimed at training Iranians in the history of non-violent conflict that were held last year in Dubai.

This is a recipe for failure. Iran’s “reformists” are not America’s friends, nor are they the people we should be supporting inside Iran. Once again, strategic deception is at work.

There was a real reformist movement at one point, but it didn’t last long. It emerged in the early months after Khatami’s first election in 1997, but was crushed by Khatami himself when he put down the July 1999 student rebellion at Tehran University.

A key leader of that movement was Mohsen Sazegarah, a founder of Iran’s dreaded Revolutionary Guards corps. After leaving government in the late 1980s, he published newspapers that were repeatedly shut by the regime. After two stints in jail, he left Iran last year and told me flat out that the reform movement was “dead.”

“This is the first time in our history that the Iranian people are turning to a foreign country for help,” he told me. “I think the United States government can help the Iranian people very much.”

That is a message Iran’s leaders – and the anti-Bush crowd here at home – don’t want Americans to hear. So their latest strategy is to undermine the just-announced U.S. policy of spending $75 million to help the pro-democracy movement inside Iran.

Sazegarah believes the main tool the U.S. should use is political recognition of the opposition. He urged a boycott of last year’s presidential elections, as a first step toward convincing the international community to reject as illegitimate Iran’s Stalinist-style elections. The reformists, on the contrary, are still hoping to change the face of the current regime, to make it more palatable to the West.

The CIA has also fallen for Iranian maskirovka, repeating year after year in unclassified intelligence assessments that “no viable opposition” exists in Iran.

This is strategic deception at its best. You’d think that the few Cold Warriors left at Langley would teach their younger colleagues the old Soviet tradecraft.

In fact, the Tehran regime is going to extraordinary lengths to discredit, dismember, and discourage real opposition inside Iran. Not only are they murdering opposition leaders wherever possible, but they coopt activists during torture sessions in jail, then set them up with “false flag” organizations to discredit the real opposition leaders who remain underground.

The message is clear to the meek and the merely disorganized: oppose us if you dare.

And yet, despite this extraordinary level of intimidation, demonstrations erupt in one Iranian city or another virtually every week, but they get little coverage in the Western media.

On March 12, for example, violent clashes rocked the predominantly Kurdish city of Piranshahr, near the border with Iran, as angry residents attacked government buildings, banks, security patrol cars and trucks. The protests followed the murder of a town resident by Islamist militiamen and the refusal of the local authorities to restitute the body to his family.

On March 8, thousands of women demonstrated peacefully in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate international women’s day. Digital video images, sent via the Internet to Iranians overseas, showed the brutal crackdown by regime security troops, led by an intelligence officer in civilian clothes. Hundreds of women were beaten and at least sixty were jailed, but little mention of the crackdown appeared in the West.

On February 13, Revolutionary Guards troops stormed a Sufi Muslim shrine in Qom, razing it to the ground and arresting upwards of 1,000 Sufi worshippers. Even Radio Free Europe acknowledged that the “scale and violence of the crackdown on the Sufis is unprecedented in the Islamic Republic.” The regime’s actions were strongly condemned by Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a respected cleric who has been under house arrest since losing a power struggle to become Supreme Leader in 1989.

In recent months, anti-regime riots have erupted in Ahwaz, along Iran’s southern border with Iraq; in Iranian Kurdistan to the northwest, and in Iranian Balouchestan, along the border with Pakistan.

Concerned about the rising tension and the efforts by Iranian journalists to report on it, the regime apparently sabotaged a government C-130 packed with nearly a hundred Iranian journalists on December 12, killing everyone on board. (One journalist managed to call his wife on his cellphone shortly before the crash to report the crazed behavior of the pilot – a young replacement who boarded the plane under official escort shortly before takeoff).

No opposition in Iran? Here is a country that is falling apart. Since September, Tehran’s bus drivers have been on strike to receive back pay and better work conditions, and have braved regime hooligans day after day. In January, workers from the Miral Glass factory walked out, also to protest not being paid.

Every time there is a soccer match, tens of thousands of Tehranis take to the streets, chanting anti-regime slogans. The events have become so notorious as anti-regime protests that the regime has tried to outlaw them, without success.

Disinformatzia and maskirovka. The Islamic Republic’s massive strategic deception is aimed at making the West believe this crumbling regime stands on solid ground, and that any Western challenge to Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be met with a stinging defeat.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

This time around with Iran, we need to get it right. The lives of millions of people depend on it.

The same State Department and CIA experts who tell us the Iranian regime is impregnable were so sure the Soviet Union would never collapse. The latter's disapperance took them completely by surprise. As we can see, the thirst for freedom in Iran is strong and it remains alive despite every effort of the country's religious despots to stamp it out. Being on the side of freedom in Iran is to be on the right side of history and to vindicate America's founding beliefs.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

The Iranian government is the logical result of theocratic fascism that gave way, slowly and ineluctably, to garden-variety fascism, widespread corruption of a cynical elite, and a police state whose guiding lights know only power. Such police states are very effective at maintaining power inasmuch as that is primarily what they are designed to do. Iraq's roots lay with Nazi Germany and Iran's more recent roots with, as the author points out, the Soviet Union in the last decade of its existence.

I suggest that the power of this sort of ideology is such that in the quarter-century of its existence it has managed to mutate Islam itself. Certainly it has forced its Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia to respond with an equally ruthless campaign of hate propaganda and arming of violent radicals.

I think that Iran is much more potentially a successful republic than Iraq ever was, and that it is also a test case of how an ideological revolutionary movement masquerading as a religion can maintain power in the face of a refractory population and international condemnation. Rather well at the moment, it seems. But not forever, probably not for long. That's why they want the bomb so badly.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20060315.aspx

"Why "People Power" Will Fail in Iran
(by James F. Dunnigan)
March 15, 2006: Since last year, the United States has been more energetically trying to build a trained democracy movement to overthrow the Iranian religious dictatorship. Using democracy as a weapon has gained a lot of believers since the late 1980s. Back then, the East European governments, all run by communist dictators (and backed up by the Soviet Union), collapsed when most of the people just stood up and said, "enough, we want change." By 1989, Eastern Europe was democratic, after over four decades of communist police states. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed the same way. This was scary stuff. Since then, there have been similar, and more deliberate, instances of this change in Serbia and Ukraine. And before that, you had a similar overthrow in the Philippines, where the term "People Power" was invented..
The moves necessary to make "People Power" work have now been turned into techniques that have been set down on check lists and presented in seminars. There's a drill that can make this happen if two conditions apply. First, most of the population must want democracy. Second, the security forces must be willing to stand down in the face of mass demonstrations. The first condition applies in Iran, the second doesn't. While the Islamic conservatives in Iran have the support of, at most, a third of the population, they do have over a hundred thousand armed men who are willing to kill to keep their religious leaders in power.
"People Power" is not a 1980s invention. Back in the 1930s, Indian democracy activists mobilized millions of people against the British colonial government. But it was admitted that, while such a movement worked against the British, it would not have worked if the colonial occupiers had been, say, German. Not today's Politically Correct Germans, but the rather more savage, pre-World War II variety. Old school Germans, who massacred Africans protesting colonial rule, and killed millions of civilians during World War II, would not have been as accommodating to peaceful demonstrators as were the British (with a few bloody exceptions.) The old school defenders of the Islamic tyrants in Iran appear ready to carry out some sustained killings to keep their masters in power."

Mr. Timmerman sends a mixed message. On the one hand, he acknowledges that much of the so-called Iranian "opposition" consists of sore loser Islamists who merely wish to put a happy face Iran's nuclear and expansionist plans. He also admits that some of the "real opposition" have been incarcerated and tortured into flying a "false flag" in order to attract Western money and moral support. Then he tells us that the Theocracy is on its kiester, and ready to crumble at any moment, but how does he know that? The women who reportedly demonstrated for their rights (and suffered for it), may have been encouraged to demonstrate by the "false flag" provocateurs. Ditto for the students who are protesting for the right to hold hands with their girlfriends in public. I've heard MSM types say that the winds of change are blowing in Iran, but I've also heard them say that most Iranians support Iran's "nuclear rights". So who took the Gallup Poll on that?

In the years before the Shah finally fell, you could tell his regime was crumbling by the number of US attaches and Iranian military officers who were being assassinated in the streets of Teheran. That was the only kind of meaningful rebellion, an armed rebellion. When the Iranian demonstrators move from "peaceful" demonstrations, to armed struggle, then maybe we can speak of "credible opposition". Until that happens, we can not afford to wait on a new Iranian revolution before we deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions, even if that means "uniting" the presumably divided Iranian "hardliners" and the so-called "opposition".

Great comments (6).

The globalist 'freedom-machine' ideology has met its match in Asia and Arabia. Proponents tend to think in terms of a mixed society, and consider cultural unity and nationalism to be outdated concepts. This seems a bit odd to me, as cultural and nationalist schisms between member-states were the main fuel for the deconstruction, and ultimate failure, of the Soviet Socialist Empire.

Iranians share a very monolithic Islamist culture, and a strong sense of nationalism. They also share a vehement anti-western mind-set. Democracy in Iran will logically produce the same result it has in Palestine. A democratically-elected militant regime with theocratic leanings, wholly bent on the destruction of Israel and the west. The best we can hope for is to keep them disarmed to the greatest extent possible and/or fighting amongst themselves for internal power.

A military campaign is absolutely necessary if it is the only way to keep Iran from building its military might to the point that it is capable of projecting power beyond its borders. I would not, however, support a nation-building campaign similar to what is taking place in Iraq. I agree that democracy has a greater chance for success in Iran than in Iraq, but is that really what we want? I would see a unified democratic Iran as greater threat to their region, and the world as a whole, than they currently represent.

22 Iran officials killed in Baluchistan clashes
Fri. 17 Mar 2006
Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 17 – Twenty-two Iranian government and provincial officials were killed in an ambush in the south-eastern province of Sistan-va-Baluchistan in the early hours of Friday morning, the government-owned news agency Fars reported.

The incident occurred at 1:20 am as a convoy packed with officials was returning from a gathering in Zabol to the city of Zahedan.

Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the convoy close to Shileh Bridge killing 22 and injuring seven officials, the report said.

Among those injured in the attack was believed to be the governor of Zahedan, Hossein-Ali Nouri. The report said that he was shot five times and is in critical condition. The head of security of the Zahedan governorate also died in the attack.

The report quoted an “informed source” in a hospital in Zabol as saying that 50 individuals were killed or injured in the attack.

Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province is home to Baluchis, a predominantly Sunni Muslim ethnic minority. Iran has witnessed escalating unrest in recent months in areas populated by Baluchis, who complain of discriminatory and repressive policies by the Shiite clerics who rule the country

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