Rooyesh

Axis Of Evil: Parliamentary objections to Iran’s nuclear negotiator being replaced with a flunky of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are a sign of his regime’s unpopularity.

Could a U.S.-backed coup prevent the need to bomb? Iran’s holocaust-denying, Israel-loathing president was forced to return to Tehran on Tuesday from a two-day visit to Armenia to attend to “unexpected developments” back home. On Monday, some 183 of the 290 members of Iran’s Majlis passed a resolution extolling the performance of Ali Larijani, the regime’s chief nuclear negotiator who unexpectedly resigned over the weekend. Larijani had clashed with Ahmadinejad regarding nuclear talks; the unknown diplomat named as his successor, Saeed Jalili, is a Mahmoud loyalist. So many lawmakers, most of them conservatives, expressing support for Larijani is clearly a snub at Ahmadinejad. One segment of parliament wrote to Ahmadinejad to complain of their not being consulted or even told before Larijani’s replacement. Yet the episode is only a small sample of Iran’s profound internal opposition and dissent almost 28 years after the establishment of its theocratic Islamic Republic.

The resistance comes from Islamic and non-Islamic sources: The Ayatollah Mohammed Kazemeini Boroujerdi is one of many Iran clerics adhering to the traditional Shiite belief that clerical rule by its very nature subjugates religion to the will of the state. After Boroujerdi preached to a large crowd at a Tehran stadium in the summer of 2006, attempts to arrest him failed because of throngs of supporters at his home. When Boroujerdi finally was seized in October 2006, hundreds of the thousands of protesters supporting him were arrested and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards could not clear crowds blocking the roads. In publicly opposing the regime for over a decade, Boroujerdi has spent months in jail. His father, also a cleric, died under suspicious circumstances in 2002; the mosque where his father preached was confiscated and his grave desecrated.

Ahmad Batebi had a death sentence reduced to 15 and then 10 years in prison for leading the pro-democracy student movement in Iran in 1999. Released temporarily to marry in 2005, Batebi went on the run to organize opposition preceding Ahmadinejad’s inauguration as president and was caught the next year. He was famously shown holding up the bloodied shirt of a fellow student on the cover of the Economist magazine. In 2007, at the age of 29, he suffered a stroke after years of prison abuse. He remains incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Batebi’s wife also has been arrested and harassed. Student activists report that unprecedented numbers of college students, in the hundreds, have been disciplined for opposing Tehran’s Islamofascist regime. Akbar Ganji, an original supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist revolution in 1979, joined the Revolutionary Guards and worked in the government’s ministry of culture. But he was to become disenchanted with the regime and became a journalist and dissident. After participating in a conference in Berlin critiquing Iran’s elections, Ganji was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment plus five years’ internal exile, later shortened to six months.

The next year he was given an additional six years in jail for articles he wrote and for possessing copies of foreign newspapers. He was released from Evin last year in poor health. Ganji has called the 2005 elections that gave Ahmadinejad the presidency “make-believe,” and has called for civil disobedience against the regime. In the 1980s, President Reagan, joined by Margaret Thatcher in Britain, led the West in successfully fighting the Cold War. We finally stopped pretending that containment and accommodation were options in dealing with the Soviet threat.

One of the ways we opposed that imperialism was to support the freedom fighters in Russian outposts like Afghanistan and Nicaragua. In his new book, “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction,” Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute argues that “political support for the tens of millions of Iranians who detest their tyrannical leaders is both morally obligatory and strategically sound” as a U.S. policy, and he considers it far preferable to a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. With 40% of Iranians living in poverty, unemployment at 15% (vs. under 3% during the Shah’s rule), and inflation so high that a new banknote featuring the atomic symbol was issued this year for 50,000 rials (worth well under $20), now may be the time to help Iranians themselves get rid of the world’s foremost danger.

Source: Investor’s Business Daily

President Bush isn’t the only one shaking his fist at Iran these days. Getting tough with Tehran is an increasingly popular bipartisan sport in Washington. 

Both the House and Senate have called on the administration to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Although those congressional resolutions lack the force of law, critics, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), worry that they could be construed by the White House as legal justification for U.S. attacks on Revolutionary Guard targets in Iran.

A terrorist designation by the State Department would allow the United States to levy sanctions against foreign companies and financial institutions that do business with the elite Guard. (American companies are already prevented from doing business with Iran.) But the administration appears to have misgivings about the terrorist designation — and for good reason.

No nation’s armed forces have ever been formally labeled “terrorist,” though Iran has been on the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism since 1984. Such a designation for the Revolutionary Guard, a 125,000-member military and intelligence force, would be a radical move that could have unforeseen consequences. Former Guard officers hold 14 of the 21 seats in the Iranian Cabinet, 80 of the 290 seats in the parliament and a host of other political and appointed offices. It’s often unclear — at least to the intelligence-challenged United States — who is currently a Guard officer, who is an alumnus and what are the relationships between any current or former Guardsman and the group’s multibillion-dollar business ventures.

Moreover, the terrorist designation would make it even more difficult to find senior Iranian leaders who could negotiate with the United States or Europe. Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, is a former Guardsman, and the U.S. has accused the Iranian ambassador to Iraq of hiding his current membership in the Guard.

Rather than risking over-broad new sanctions, it would be wiser for the Treasury Department to target those Iranian officials known to be involved in terrorist activities or in specific business ventures whose proceeds fund the country’s nuclear program. Or it might focus on specific units of the Guard, such as the notorious Quds Force, which is accused of arming Iraqi insurgents. But far more important than fashioning more U.S. penalties that other countries will ignore is gaining the cooperation of German, Chinese and Russian officials in enforcing existing sanctions. Taking the prospect of a U.S. military strike against Iran off the table, at least for the duration of the Bush administration, could help.

Escalating hostilities will not advance what must be the primary U.S. goal: deterring Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and thus destabilizing the entire Middle East. Tehran must decide that keeping its nuclear program is not worth the cost in economic and political isolation. And Washington must decide what it is willing to offer Russia and China to induce their cooperation in constraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Meanwhile, Congress should make clear that it will not countenance a disastrous expansion of the Iraq war to Iran. It should start by passing legislation written by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) that prohibits the use of U.S. funds for military operations in Iran, its airspace or waters without specific congressional authorization. The bill carefully leaves exceptions for intelligence, hot pursuit and repelling an Iranian attack. It may not suffice to prevent a deliberate or unwitting clash with Iran — but it is an essential first step.

Source: The Los Angeles Times