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