[Mb-civic] FW: Ken Timmerman: Getting Iran Wrong Again

[Golsorkhi]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 11:39:01 -0500
Subject: Ken Timmerman: Getting Iran Wrong Again



Begin forwarded message:
> 
>  
>  
> Getting Iran Wrong ­ AgainBy Kenneth R. Timmerman
> <http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1021>
> FrontPageMagazine.com | March 16, 2006
> 
> When making a revolution, allies matter. So do enemies. If you can¹t identify
> your friends and target your enemies, you¹re 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 ³could
> backfire,² by tainting activists as American agents.
> 
> ³We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that
> stupid George Bush,² he triumphantly quotes an Iranian ³human rights activist²
> as saying.
> 
> The only problem is, the ³human rights activists² and ³pro-democracy² folks
> Karl Vick quotes are nothing of the sort. They are members of the discredited
> ³reformist² movement, which ruled Iran from 1989 until last year.
> 
> The reformist movement is not happy with the election of Iran¹s 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 Iran¹s 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 Iran¹s 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.
> 
> America¹s 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 ³active measures,² 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. Iran¹s conspiracy-minded clerics and spymasters
> turned out to be star pupils.
> 
> Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright fell for Iran¹s strategic deception
> campaigns repeatedly. So did the Europeans, who believed all during the 1990s
> they could engage in ³constructive engagement² 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
> ³surrogate² Radio Free Iran to be transformed into ³Radio Khatami.² (Known
> officially as Radio Farda (³Tomorrow²), the radio got its nickname because of
> its sycophantic treatment of Rafsanjani¹s ³reformist² successor, Hojjat-ol
> eslam Mohammad Khatami.)
> 
> It¹s absolutely critical that we get Iran right. On one side, we have a fake
> Iranian ³resistance² 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 Department¹s designation
> of the group, which dates from 1994, as an international terrorist
> organization.
> 
> ³Imagine the message that would send to the Iranian people,² one
> administration official who is appalled at the MEK lobbying efforts told me.
> ³So we¹re telling them they should be ruled by some crazy terrorist cult?² As
> I reported <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20972>
>  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 Iran¹s Trotskyists, if
> you will. 
> 
> On the other hand, you have the ³reformists,² 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 ³reform² movement
> ³human rights activists.²
> 
> So, apparently, did the State Department, misled as ever by the Council on
> Foreign Relations and its acolytes. State careerists chose self-styled
> ³reformists² 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. Iran¹s ³reformists² are not America¹s 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 didn¹t last long. It
> emerged in the early months after Khatami¹s 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 Iran¹s
> 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 ³dead.²
> 
> ³This is the first time in our history that the Iranian people are turning to
> a foreign country for help,² he told me. ³I think the United States government
> can help the Iranian people very much.²
> 
> That is a message Iran¹s leaders ­ and the anti-Bush crowd here at home ­
> don¹t 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 year¹s presidential elections,
> as a first step toward convincing the international community to reject as
> illegitimate Iran¹s 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 ³no viable opposition² exists in
> Iran.
> 
> This is strategic deception at its best. You¹d 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 ³false flag²
> 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 Tehran¹s Laleh Park
> to commemorate international women¹s day. Digital video images
> <http://www.iran.org/> , 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 ³scale and violence of the
> crackdown on the Sufis is unprecedented in the Islamic Republic.² The regime¹s
> 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 Iran¹s
> 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, Tehran¹s 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 Republic¹s massive strategic
> deception is aimed at making the West believe this crumbling regime stands on
> solid ground, and that any Western challenge to Iran¹s 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.




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