Thursday, 19th November 2009
Storm Clouds in the East
Barack Obama inherited an almost impossible legacy from George W. Bush in the Middle East. Bush’s motto seems to have been “If two wrongs don’t make a right…try three!” On the one hand Obama has the dilemma of Afghanistan and whether or not to send more US troops to try to stifle the determined onslaught by the Taliban. On the other hand, he is committed to withdrawing US forces from Iraq in the latter part of 2010, despite the fact that there is still great instability in that country. Overshadowing all of this is the massive support for Israel that defines US foreign policy and which an American President ignores at his peril.
To this unstable background we can add the already nuclear armed Pakistan and its President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the slain Benazir Bhutto, to the danger list. Successive governments in Pakistan pandered to the Islamic fundamentalists in an effort to bolster their own popularity. Now, in an attempt to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted, the Pakistani army is trying to crack down on the militants in the Peshawar border area with Afghanistan, on Pakistan’s North West frontier. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have responded by mounting an increasingly vicious series of suicide bombings and assassinations across the whole of Pakistan, driving that country relentlessly towards the ignominious and highly dangerous condition of becoming a failed state. Al Qaeda must be licking its lips in eager anticipation.
Meanwhile, one country has recognised the opportunity that all of this affords. One country is seeking to sponsor the growing instability to further its own ambitions. That country is Iran.
Since Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won his second fraudulent election earlier this year, the fascist clerical regime in Tehran, under the iron grasp of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been able to advance its goals by taking advantage of indecision and division among Western allies.
The clerical regime is conveniently advancing its domestic and foreign policy objectives without running into an effective response by the West on either front. Domestically, repression has been ramped up, with a rising number of executions, amputations, stoning to death of women and men, mass arbitrary arrests, closure of media outlets and the increasing brutalisation of women and young people.
Leaders of the popular uprising which took place following the elections, have been rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, subjected to show-trials, and some have now been sentenced to death. Students have been beaten and dragged from their homes and dormitories by the brutal Basij militia and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, never to be seen again.
But, the Iranian people are virtually undaunted by all this brutality. It was Anton Checkov who said “Love, Friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.” How very true and how appropriate in the case of modern Iran, where a common hatred of the tyrannical mullahs has united the people of Iran in passionate opposition to their oppressors.
On the 4th of November, tens of thousands of protesters again took to the streets of Iran’s main cities chanting “Death to Khamenei, Death to the Dictator”. Once more, hundreds were beaten and arrested. No longer do the crowds wave green flags and ribbons as a sign of support for the Opposition leader Mousavi. That has long-since disappeared. By some accounts, nearly one hundred thousand political prisoners were executed while Mousavi was Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989. Thirty thousand, yes, thirty thousand of those were massacred in a spate of few months in 1988, in what Amnesty International has described as a manifest crime against humanity. Tens of thousands of children were sent to the war fronts with Iraq to be used as mine sweepers.
He is not much different from Ahmadinejad. The only reason he became an early figurehead for the opposition was because of the blatant way that the presidential election result on June 12 was fiddled to show Ahmadinejad winning by a landslide. That provided an apt pretext for a disenchanted population to express their opposition to the theocracy.
For months now, those taking to the streets have replaced their chants of “Mousavi” with cries for freedom and democracy and an end to the fascist theocracy that rules Iran. Where once Supreme Leader Khamenei was deemed to hold sway because of his direct line to God, now he is seen as a corrupt and evil dictator who personally intervened to ensure Ahmadinejad was declared the victor of the June elections. His grasp on power now relies not on God but on brute force and oppression. Freedom and democracy in Iran are a forgotten dream.
The mullahs are advancing their destructive foreign policy agenda, too. They dream of Tehran as the centre of an Islamic Empire, ruled under a strict Sharia code and stretching in an ominous crescent around the key oil-producing nations of the Middle East. That is why they are desperate to build a nuclear arsenal, to spread their vicious Islamo-fascist philosophy.
For over three decades, their fingerprints have been found on many of the worst terrorist atrocities around the world. Their malign influence is evident in Palestine, where they fomented the civil war and the division of that country. They backed Hezbollah in the war against Israel in Lebanon, supplying arms and cash. Only two weeks ago, the Israeli Navy intercepted a huge shipment of missiles and other armaments that the Iranians were attempting to send to Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have poured money into Yemen in support of the Shia rebels who are fighting a bloody war against the Sunnis on the border with Saudi Arabia.
The mullahs have even sought support from other maverick or anti-American regimes worldwide. Latin America has become a battleground for competing Middle East powers, whose leaders are crisscrossing the continent seeking support from an increasingly strategic region. President Peres of Israel was in Brazil last week trying to persuade that country to resist attempts by Iran and Hezbollah to sign them up as an ally. He presented intelligence detailing alleged Hezbollah and Iranian activities in the border region between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Mr Peres warned that Hezbollah is planning to strike Jewish and Israeli targets on the South American continent again, as it did in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish centre that killed 85 people. In August 2009, the mastermind behind that attack, Ahmad Vahidi, was appointed as Iran’s Defence Minister. He is on Interpol's most wanted list over the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing.
But this is not an isolated case within Ahmadinejad’s Cabinet. Former Guard commanders make up about two-thirds of the cabinet, including the foreign minister, Monouchehr Mottaki, who was expelled as Ambassador to Turkey because of his involvement in assassination and torture of Iranian dissidents. The former nuclear negotiator and current Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani and many other high-ranking officials are also one-time members of the IRGC. The Guards comprise the backbone of the Iranian regime's system of oppression. At least 80 former members sit in the 290 seat parliament, with others serving as mayors and provincial governors.
The IRGC has grown into a major financial machine, which supplies Tehran's key economic needs, enabling the fundamentalist regime to spread terrorism throughout the Middle East and even Europe. It controls 30 per cent of Iran's non-oil exports and more than 57 per cent of the country's imports, in addition to vast new contracts to develop Iran's oil and gas fields.
The IRGC now has ties to more than 100 companies that control roughly $11.6 billion in construction and engineering capital. Its commercial annual revenue is reported to reach at least $4.8 billion.
The Qods (Jerusalem) Force, the main extra-territorial terrorist apparatus of the IRGC, established 17 years ago, has more than 21,000 Iranian members and tens of thousands of non-Iranian mercenaries, including in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and many European countries. The Qods Force has dozens of garrisons across Iran where it trains its non-Iranian operatives. So far, it is reported that at least 7,000 suicide bombers have enlisted for volunteer operations with the Qods Force. These are the murderous killers whom an IRGC general said would be unleashed in waves across Israel and the Middle East if anyone attempted to attack Iran's nuclear installations.
So these are the criminals and psychopaths who now rule modern Iran under the presidency of Ahmadinejad, himself a former Revolutionary Guard Corps chief. And more ominously, they are steadily consolidating their hold on neighbouring Iraq, funding and supplying trained military personnel who have heavily infiltrated the Iraqi army and police. Iraq is a stepping-stone for the creation of the mullahs’ Islamic Empire.
Such is the extent of Iranian meddling in Iraq that David Horgan, Managing Director of Petrel Resources, a major oil exploration company that has been doing business in Iraq for decades, told the Iraq Commission chaired by Lord King recently, that it is necessary to get the blessing of the Ministry of Petroleum in Tehran, before you start drilling in the south of Iraq! Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will be forever grateful to George W. Bush for his ill-advised invasion and occupation of Iraq! It has helped them to achieve one of their long-term expansionist goals.
The mullahs and their clique of fascist supporters are eerily similar to the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s. Like the Nazis, they are extremely intolerant of even a shred of dissent and torture, hang and oppress their own people to maintain an illegitimate monopoly on power. Like the Nazis, they are also masters of propaganda, spreading lies to deface opponents and to justify defiance of international law. Like the Nazis, they undermine international peace and security by spreading their brand of fascist hatred worldwide through conflict, bloodshed and terror. Like the Nazis, they are adept at countering fear with hope, deluding other powers into negotiations when necessary and later opening the tiger’s cage when opportunity knocks.
For them no laws are respectable and nothing is sacred. What is more, they share an intense feeling of anti-Semitism with Hitler. Hitler’s Nazis portrayed the Jews as parasites and locusts. Ahmadinejad referred to Israel in a speech as “A black and filthy microbe called the Zionist regime.” He denies the holocaust and has repeatedly said he wants to wipe Israel off the map. Now he is building the nuclear weapons that will enable him to do so.
He is the Hitler of this millennium. And yet, like Europe’s initial reaction to the Nazis, we are following the path of appeasement. While Europe dithers and delays, the mullahs race ahead with their nuclear programme. While the West pretends to impose tough sanctions, leading European companies are all the while supplying sanction-busting equipment to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Germany in particular is complicit in the construction of massive tunnelling projects connected to the nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, while Italy supplies specialist military equipment necessary for the new long-range Shahab Missile launchers.
Javier Solana, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, pretends to talk tough in Tehran, yet always looks for ways to appease the mullahs.
Ahmadinejad has rejected all offers of compromise and has continued the expansion of the project with over 3000 centrifuges now operating in cascade to enrich weapons-grade uranium. Of course the regime argues that this enrichment process is purely for peaceful purposes, for the generation of electricity. Where then are the nuclear power stations? There is one nuclear plant at Bushehr in Iran, built by Russia and with a 20 year Russian contract to provide enriched uranium fuel. There are no others and none are being built. Instead, as was recently revealed, plants are secretly being built that are too small to produce fuel for electricity but just the right size to dish out fuel for a nuclear bomb.
Only this week, Ivan Oelrich - Acting President of the Federation of American Scientists, said that Iran "wont be able to produce a reactor's worth of fuel every 90 years, but it will be able to produce one bomb a year." And yet, also this week we have had the unedifying spectacle of Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Authority and an apologist for the regime in Tehran, exposed as having tried to stitch up a secret deal that would have allowed Iran to keep the bulk of its nuclear programme in return for the West lifting all sanctions! It is almost unbelievable that such craven appeasement could even be contemplated, but then from ElBaradei, nothing should surprise us!
The US and Israel say that Iran has to be stopped from developing a nuclear weapon at any cost and that a military strike on their nuclear installations might be the only option if dialogue fails. But that would be a catastrophic mistake. A military strike on Iran would simply pour petrol on the flames of conflict in the Middle East and unite the Islamic world against the West.
Being strongly opposed to war, the EU sees no other alternative but to pursue relentlessly its policy of appeasement.
But there is an alternative to either military intervention or appeasement. There is a third way, which seeks to cultivate the vast potentials of a suppressed population. We should give our support to and empower the main Iranian opposition movement to the mullahs and help them to achieve regime change. We should provide leadership and support for the tens of thousands of ordinary Iranians who risk their lives daily to take to the streets in protest.
So far at the direct request of the mullahs, we have done the very opposite. The debacle over the blacklisting in Europe of the main Iranian opposition movement – the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), exposed the worst excesses of this appeasement strategy. It revealed how we have treated our enemies as friends and our friends as enemies.
The mullahs fear and loathe the PMOI and their political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), led by the inspirational Mrs Maryam Rajavi. Their commitment to a secular democracy with recognition of human rights, women’s rights, freedom, an end to torture and the death penalty and the abolition of nuclear weapons, is the direct antithesis to everything the mullahs stand for.
Since coming to power 30 years ago, the mullahs have murdered 120,000 PMOI supporters in Iran and assassinated many others around the world. Their determination to wipe out this key threat to their stranglehold on power, defines a major facet of their foreign policy. Every negotiator from the West is met with a list of demands, top of which is an insistence that the PMOI be designated as a terrorist organisation, so that their assets can be frozen and their activities severely curtailed.
The West, with pathetic naiveté and a fawning lust for petro-dollar contracts, is always keen to oblige. This has imbued the mullahs with a much needed sense of comfort to rely on the prospect of unending Western concessions.
When Jack Straw was Britain’s Foreign Minister, he admitted that he had placed the PMOI on the UK terror list and successfully persuaded the Council of Ministers to put them on the EU terror list as well, at the specific request of the mullahs. This wretched charade fell apart last year when the UK Court of Appeal ordered the British Home Secretary to remove the PMOI from the UK terror list, stating that there was no justification whatsoever for their blacklisting.
Undeterred, the mullahs quickly found another EU Member State willing to do their bidding in exchange for lucrative contracts and the elusive pledge to end their escalating uranium enrichment programme. Unsurprisingly this willing poodle of the mullahs was France. The French government was persuaded to seek the approval of the Council of Ministers to maintain the PMOI on the European blacklist. That was a blatant breach of European law and was quickly thrown out by the European Court of Justice.
The PMOI was de-listed in Europe and justice at long last prevailed. But the whole saga revealed the shocking lengths Western governments were prepared to go to please the fascist regime in Tehran, even to the extent of illegally fabricating false accusations of terrorism against innocent people in exchange for empty pledges from the mullahs. Of course promises by the mullahs that they would cease their nuclear enrichment programme were never fulfilled and recent intelligence revealed to the West by the PMOI, including the revelation of the underground nuclear bunkers near the holy city of Qom, proves that work is continuing apace on the construction, not only of nuclear warheads, but also of the delivery systems to launch them.
It was PMOI supporters inside Iran, at huge risk to themselves, who first revealed to the West the existence of the mullahs’ nuclear programme in 2002. They continue to provide the West with up to date intelligence almost on a daily basis. It is time the West reciprocated by offering some help to the PMOI.
23 years ago, after a brutal crackdown on the PMOI in Iran by the Ayatollahs, 3,400 of them fled across the border and set up a camp in Northern Iraq. Over the years the PMOI have built Camp Ashraf into a thriving, small city, with hospitals, factories and homes. It is a beacon of peace, stability and democracy in an unsettled region.
The residents of Ashraf are unarmed civilians, but their presence, close to the Iranian border, has been a source of constant irritation to the mullahs who have repeatedly demanded the closure of the camp and the forced repatriation of its inhabitants to Iran, where they would face certain torture and execution.
On 28th and 29th July this year, the Iraqi authorities finally gave in to Iranian bullying and launched a vicious assault on the camp, using 2000 heavily armed police to batter, shoot and mow down scores of defenceless and unarmed refugees. Police fired live ammunition and used tear gas, pepper sprays, batons, iron bars, clubs, boiling water sprayed at high pressure and stun grenades. Iraqi military loaders and armoured vehicles demolished gates, fences, and walls of the refugee camp, ruthlessly running over and crushing protesters, while foot soldiers swarmed into the camp from various entry points.
Eleven innocent people were killed. Five hundred were injured. Thirty six were beaten, tortured and held hostage for 72 days in Iraqi prisons, despite repeated demands by the international community for their release and despite three separate judges in Iraq ruling that they must be immediately set free.
It was only when several of the hostages were within hours of dying from the effects of a dry-hunger strike that the Iraqi authorities finally released them and took them back to Camp Ashraf.
But now they are threatening to displace forcibly the remaining 3400 refugees by mid-December, transporting them to the Southern Desert in Iraq where they would be at the mercy of the Shia insurgents who are directly controlled by Tehran. If this happens, there will be a massacre. It will be a humanitarian catastrophe that the West has been warned about for months.
On 24th April this year the European Parliament in Strasbourg passed an urgent resolution demanding protection for the 3400 Ashraf refugees. This followed a prolonged siege of the camp by Iraqi forces, which disrupted food, fuel and water supplies and prevented doctors from providing medical assistance to seriously ill residents of the camp. But our pleas were ignored and innocent lives were lost as a result. The UN must now send a permanent monitoring force to protect the refugees in Ashraf.
These 3400 people have been recognized as protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the government of Prime Minister Al-Maliki in Baghdad must be told to respect international law instead of kowtowing to the demands of the fascist mullahs in Iran.
But is it any wonder that entreaties from the West are now routinely ignored in the Middle East? Western governments will do nothing to stop Ahmadinejad, so why should the Arab countries? Western states have been reluctant to take steps that may lead to an escalation of tensions between the West and Tehran. On the contrary, Iran has repeatedly thumbed its nose at the West, rejecting one offer of compromise after another, forcing Javier Solana, the EU’s High Official for Foreign Affairs, to concede in a speech earlier this year that the talks with Iran have led to nothing. “There has been no progress. Iran continues to ignore us”, he said.
In the same debate, he and Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the Commissioner for External Affairs, again and again emphasised the need for on-going discussion, debate and negotiation. “People to people” contact is what is needed, Mrs Ferrero-Waldner assured us, outlining the EU’s strategy in opening our universities to Iranian students of nuclear physics and pouring Euros into a ‘poverty alleviation fund’! It almost beggars belief that our taxpayer’s are relieving poverty in one of the world’s richest oil-exporting nations, whose leaders have corruptly embezzled billions and who choose to squander their cash on building weapons of mass destruction which will target European citizens.
Europe’s feeble response in the face of the mullahs’ continuing intransigence, has simply convinced the mullahs that we are weak and encouraged them on their chosen path to Middle East domination.
The current situation has placed the West in front of a fateful dilemma on Iran. We must either accept the emergence of a nuclear-armed, radical Jihadist theocracy, potentially the world's first 'suicide state' and its dominating role in the most sensitive region of the world, or we must adopt a firm and resolute policy to confront the mullahs’ ambitions. The critical situation in Iraq and Iran’s well-advanced nuclear programme mean that the West has only a limited amount of time to make this crucial decision.
The definition of appeasement is "the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else's expense." It is shameful that Europe continues to act out of fear and cowardice and it is high time they realised that the peace they have bought is only temporary and the price they have paid has been freedom and democracy for the people of Iran. Of course, this temporary peace has enabled the mullahs to expand their arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the meantime and thus pose an even greater danger to Europeans.
Just like Hitler, the specter of Ahmadinejad’s regime will come to haunt us in the not-too-distant future.
Only the main opposition movement, the PMOI and the NCRI, offer a vision of hope for a free democratic Iran where human rights and women's rights will be respected, weapons of mass destruction banned and the death penalty abolished. Otherwise, we will continue to see instability and destruction in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries that Iran wants to exploit for its own ends. We must end the policy of appeasement towards the mullahs, slap tough and effective sanctions on them and back the Iranian people’s opposition movement for democracy.
