Iranian Alert -- February 13, 2004 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD --Americans for Regime Change in Iran

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. Starting June 10th of this year, Iranians have begun taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy. Many even want the US to over throw their government.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

US Dismisses Thought of Thaw in Relations with Iran

February 13, 2004
The Financial Times
Guy Dinmore

While US wrestlers limber up for a fight in Iran next week, the Islamic republic's soccer team is preparing for its first match on US soil since the Bush administration branded Iran part of an "axis of evil".

Following the large US rescue contingent sent last month to the earthquake-ravaged city of Bam, many US and Iranian analysts are speaking again of a thaw in relations and the possibility of a new phase of engagement. US officials said that conclusion would be quite wrong. "It is 'regime change' in lower case," said one official who asked not to be named. "People-to-people outreach is a form of regime change."

Last October, Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, told a congressional committee that the pursuit of "regime change" in Iran was not official US policy.

But the Bush White House still thinks that pressure on Iran can help bring the regime down, even though it has not ruled out the possibility of a limited dialogue on specific issues when in US national interests. "In general the administration is coming to believe that the regime cannot be changed gradually, but only through internal tumult, like another revolution," the official said. "We can aid this by isolating them."

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, told the Financial Times that the current US policy of refusing to engage Iran was founded on the belief that the regime would collapse from within. He said he was not sure if this was a correct assumption.

With resources almost exclusively focused on Iraq, a clear-cut policy on what to do with the Shia theocracy in Tehran has not evolved, officials say.

For the moment, however, it is unlikely that the Bush administration will follow the European Union. EU foreign ministers have in effect shifted from dealing with Mohammad Khatami, the moderate president seen as incapable of delivering on key issues, and entered into a formal dialogue with his hardline rivals who have marginalised the reformist faction.

The Bush administration never did share the EU enthusiasm for Mr Khatami in the first place. But officials say it does not intend to undercut the people's reform movement by offering a compact with the hardliners.

With Libya and North Korea, the Bush administration was willing to offer a grand deal of financial incentives and mutual recognition in exchange for action on weapons of mass destruction and support for militants. But, US officials explain, unlike Iran these countries have no internal dynamic that offers any real alternative to those two regimes.

Iran also carries much more emotional baggage for Washington. Officials struggle to explain why. But it is clear that the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the ensuing 444-day hostage crisis, plus Hizbollah's devastating attacks on the US in Lebanon in 1983, carry more emotional weight than Libya's bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 or the Korean war half a century ago.

But Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme and its position, in US eyes, as the "leading state sponsor of terrorism", present the actual hurdles. Even before it was revealed this week that the International Atomic Energy Agency had found an undeclared design for advanced centrifuges, the Bush administration thought Iran was cheating on the EU-brokered commitment it made to the IAEA to freeze its uranium enrichment programme.

The CIA has concluded that Iran will not abandon its suspected nuclear weapons programme and that more intrusive international inspections will not be sufficient to prevent weapons development.

On terrorism, officials said a Syrian aircraft, allowed to take aid to Bam, returned with weapons for the Iranian-backed Hizbollah.

"Has Iran abandoned terrorism as a significant policy tool? The answer is 'no'," one official commented.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1075982535814&p=1012571727172

Strange(?) parters:
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=49028

ROME, FEB. 13, 2004 (Zenit.org).- The Holy See maintains relations with Iran to promote good relations between believers and cultures and to defend the rights of Catholics who live there, says a Vatican official.

Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican secretary for relations with states, made that point Thursday in a public ceremony at the Gregorian University to mark a half-century of diplomatic relations between Iran and the Holy See.

Attendees included Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, who had a private audience with John Paul II that day.

At the start of the meeting at the Gregorian, a message of greeting that Iranian President Mohammed Khatami sent to the Pope was read.

Kharrazi said, emphasizing the importance of dialogue between believers, said: "The political and cultural institutions that make up the international community, tired of relations based on confrontation and violence, have greater need than ever of dialogue, tolerance and peace: necessary aspects to address world and regional crises."

In turn, Archbishop Lajolo read a message of greeting from the Pope to President Khatami, which stressed that the objective of all international relations is the affirmation of man's inalienable rights: justice, freedom, solidarity, social and cultural progress, and peace.

"International cooperation must progress on the path of nuclear nonproliferation and the struggle against terrorism," said the papal message which was summarized on Vatican Radio.

At the end of the meeting, Archbishop Lajolo told Vatican Radio that the "Holy See looks with attention at Iran, both because of its presence in the international context -- a very important presence -- as well as the little community of Catholics living in the country."

"They are about 10,000 faithful in a population of 80 million inhabitants, almost all of the Islamic religion," he said. "The Holy See is ready to defend and watch over its freedom of conscience, of faith, of religion, lived both individually as well as in community."

"On the Iranian side, we are assured that there is full freedom of conscience for Catholics and also of worship," the archbishop reported.

"We have questions that remain to be resolved [referring] above all, to freedom of worship, to freedom of organization, and to the granting of entry visas for religious coming from outside, whose presence is necessary for the small number of Catholics of Iran," he said.

"We then have problems that affect the schools, which at the beginning of the '80s were expropriated from the Catholic institutions that directed them," Archbishop Lajolo continued.

"Our relations with Iran," he added, "are, in any case, relations animated by mutual good will of understanding and ever greater concord."

Interesting analysis:
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=270014&lang=e&dir=news

The IRI in Iran: Its End is Sure, But What Will Follow? By Mark Dankof 10-02-2004

Advocates of theocracy from the Reconstructionist movement within the American Christian Right to the most extreme Zionists in the Eretz Israel movement are notoriously bad instruments of secular governance and international diplomacy, both historically and presently.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more obvious than in Iran, where the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) regime teeters on the brink of disarray and collapse. The reasons are legion, including an ongoing case of the economic doldrums and a brand of domestic repression arguably more intense than its Pahlavi predecessor. The glaring internal contradictions in the present political and cultural infrastructure of Iran seem to guarantee ongoing conflict, with endgame as yet unknown. It is a struggle with enormous stakes for the indigenous peoples of that nation, the Iranian diaspora living abroad, and the world?s most important geopolitical players in the competition for oil and natural gas reserves and pipelines.

There is one thing we do know. The present attempt in Iran to concurrently preserve theocracy and democracy in Tehran cannot survive. Only one side can prevail; any domestic political tranquility is but a prelude to the final struggle.

On the theocratic side of the equation stands Iran?s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his Council of Guardians, a supervisory body of twelve (12) members dedicated to the preservation of ultimate political governance and power by Shiite Islamic clerics allegedly in receipt of the direct revelatory guidance of God. On the democratic side of the divide is the elected President of Iran, Mohammed Khatami, and the 292-member Majlis, or national Iranian parliament.

The tensions were exacerbated to the near-boiling point on January 10th, with the unilateral decision of the Council of Guardians to disqualify more than 3, 000 of 8,000 nominated candidates of the Majlis, including 80 incumbent members largely associated with the secular Reformers and President Khatami. Signs of negotiation and compromise between Khamenei, the Guardians, the Reformers and Khatami were initially evidenced, only to be followed February 4th by more ominous developments. Safa Haeri of Iran Press Service now reports renewed hard-line statements by Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Mohammed Yazdi about insuring the sanctity of the February 20th elections, without delay or significant reapproachment with government ministers, provincial governors, and Majlis reformers outraged by the circumvention of parliamentary democracy by the Council of Guardians edict of disqualification. Even more ominously, Haeri reports an overt threat by the Revolutionary Guards, the enforcement wing of the IRI regime, that the 127 deputies who resigned in protest of a rigged election may well be "tried shortly for treachery against the Islamic Republic and its magnanimous leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."

Events may be careening out of control. Dichotomous positions are hardening. The fuse is lit for both revolutionary violence and the counter-revolutionary attack of the regime. Conditions are tragically conducive for foreign intrigue and intervention. And it is abundantly clear that the mullahs insistence on the doctrine of velayat-e-faqih (semi-divine status in providing an ultimate fundamentalist check on the decisions of a secular Republican government) cannot be harmonized with the expressed desires of the Reformers. Synthesis and compromise will be jettisoned for a life and death struggle to the finish.

There are dangers for all sides concerned. For Khameini and the Guardians, the demographics of Iran are a ticking time bomb. The Economist notes that two-thirds of Iran?s 70 million people are under the age of 30; fully half are under the age of 20. For this burgeoning constituency, there is no personal memory of the American-inspired coup that removed Mossadegh in 1953, or the repressive character of the Pahlavi regime that followed. Their focus is exclusively on economic growth and development that must of necessity be linked to secular political reforms, the cessation of social repression, and the attraction of foreign investment-- entities simply incompatible with ancient notions of theocratic rule. There is yet another notable quandary for Khameini and the Guardians?how to cope with an age of Internet communication which has made the IRI regime?s domestic control of the dissemination of information and news-spin all but impossible. This is self evident, as Tehran dailies parroting the line of the Guardians like Jomhouri-e-Islami and Siassat-Rouz are contradicted by Internet and Farsi language short-wave radio communications which link Iranian human-rights dissidents and larger masses of indigenous listeners to lines of news and analysis which threaten the aura of deification that once surrounded the Islamic regime. As is the case with all forms of totalitarianism, the IRI and its chief theocrats are losing the war for the minds of its people. With the beginning of this process is the predictable end of Islamic theocracy in Iran.

This inevitability does not exempt President Khatemi and the Reformers from their own difficulties. The failure in the last several years to curb the reactionary excesses of the Islamic conservatives using the judicial branch of the Iranian government to nullify reform, and the failure to curb the oversight authority of the Council of Guardians has now served to challenge the political viability and credibility of the President and the Majlis Reformers. Human rights activists and hoards of young, impatient masses fed up with the IRI want change?and they want it now. Khatemi and the Reformers must deliver tangible political goods and services, or face their own consignment to the ashheap of Iranian political history. The winds of revolutionary political and cultural change are blowing. They will not be quenched. The great irony is that these forces may envelop the Reformers no less than the mullahs as time and patience run out. The events of February 4th suggest this as the probable?and dangerous--outcome.

What can or should replace the IRI era in Iran on a long term basis? The answer to this pivotal question may well lie in the development of a political system which centers in the formation of a secular, constitutional government founded in a truly representative Majlis, a Presidency with clearly defined prerogatives and proscriptions, and a judiciary rooted in Western concepts of jurisprudence. None of this implies either a latent or overt hostility to the legitimacy of the Shiite Islamic cultural tradition of Iran, even as doctrinaire notions of theocracy must be discarded as dysfunctional. And what about the tradition of monarchy in Persian history, dating back to the days of Cyrus and the Achaemenid kings who chronologically followed him? The best educated guess is that a monarchy with limited, titular powers is indicated, preserving the existence of a king perceived by the people as blessed with the divine Zoroastrian conception of the farr, or favor of God, even as monarchial absolutism is rejected as incompatible with constitutional, republican government and the future needs of the Iranian people.

One fundamental mistake must be avoided by the legitimate Iranian human rights activists and reformers inside and outside the country. Their functional alliances with foreign governments and global economic consortiums cannot be allowed to undermine the legitimate national interests and aspirations of the people in a truly independent Iran. In the 20th century alone, the tragedy of British, Russian, and American machinations there should remain fresh in the minds of those Iranians who truly desire the re-establishment of their nation?s fortunes. Internationally based Marxist movements are to be avoided, as is the theocratically oriented wing of global Islam. At the same time, the dangers of a perpetual alliance between Iranian independence movements and the agents of American neo-conservative influence cannot be underestimated. The recently expressed interest of the American Enterprise Institute in providing a venue for players in the Iranian human rights movement is but one obvious example. If the public perception is generated that anti-IRI forces have become an especially useful?and covert--tool in the furtherance of the primary interests of the American Empire and the Zionist State of Israel, the drive for a truly independent and free Iran will have been arrested, perhaps permanently. Iranian Nationalist Republic (INR) leader Bizhan Hekmat?s statements to Safa Haeri on this subject on February 4th indicate a gross underestimation of the power of the Jewish lobby in both the Executive and Legislative branches of the American government. His naivete exposes him, and his honest cohorts, to exploitation in a game with a stacked deck they cannot win. A Faustian bargain is no bargain at all.

Finally, the constructive role to be played by the United States in these developments is unfortunately limited. American claims to desire the national autonomy and independence of a free Iran are belied by the Central Intelligence Agency?s skillful execution of the 1953 coup that overthrew the popularly elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. The reverberations from that tragedy now work in tandem with Straussian neo-conservative advisors within the Bush Administration to produce Middle Eastern policies rooted in the utilization of both covert operations and the overt, preemptive employment of American military force to enact regime changes in the region. The methodology is obviously failing at present to produce a legitimate government for the people of Iraq, even as American lives and dollars continue to go down the proverbial drain. If the same methodology is pursued with both Syria and Iran, the tragic consequences will multiply exponentially, both for the countries of central Asia as well as for the United States itself.

Bush must reverse the implementation of these policies elsewhere before the tragic effects prove irreversibly cataclysmic. In the case of Iran, domestic political events there must be allowed to take their course without overt foreign intervention, American or otherwise. The alleged threat of Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz and Bushehr must be handled in the context of IAEA inspections and auspices, not in veiled threats of preemptive American or Israeli air strikes on the facilities, even as the American Administration must demand nothing less of Israel than any other nation in the region when it comes to IAEA nuclear facility inspections and regard for international law and human rights. This must include a no-nonsense policy of the support of the United States for a truly independent Palestinian state. American claims of support for a free and independent Iran will possess zero credibility when expressed in the Middle East in tandem with continued support for the repression of the Palestinian people by alignment with the regime and policies of Ariel Sharon. An ongoing alliance with Sharon will damage the credibility of the United States globally, as it already has--even as enemies of America increase and are recruited daily as a result of the very policies Mr. Bush and his minions claim will produce a furtherance of the national security of the North American continent.

Again, the eventual failure and demise of the IRI is not in doubt. What remains to be shown is whether or not the fortunes of the Iranian nation and its people can be re-established in a constitutional republic with a limited monarchy, the jettisoning of theocracy, and the creation of a broad-based movement of independence that resists the repristination of Iran as a vassal state of outside foreign powers. Only time will tell.

(Mark Dankof is a Lutheran pastor and free-lance journalist, occasionally contributing to Iran Dokht, Al Bawaba, Nile Media, CASCFEN, and other Internet news sites. Once a 3rd party candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware [2000], he maintains the web-site Mark Dankof's America while pursuing post-graduate theological education at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.)

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