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The Iranian regime – financier of Iraqi insurgency, oppressor of its people and emerging nuclear threat – is the subject of international condemnation from the United States and Europe alike. As a pariah on the axis of evil, it boasts consistent abuse of human rights and a theocratic regime which stifles all political opposition. Add to this its profoundly destabilising effect on the Middle East and the anti-western rhetoric of its leaders and we have a regime that is not supposed to be a friend of our government.
And yet there is considerable evidence to suggest that Western governments are forced to bend to the will of the clerical dictatorship in Tehran. This is despite the British and United States governments’ supposedly tough stance against Iran. US Intelligence has found that the 2003 Al-Qaeda attacks in Riyadh as well as the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been resourced by the Iranian regime. Meanwhile, on the international stage, American politicians play very well on domestic public opinion with their livid rhetoric against Iran and its nuclear ambitions.
Like the United States and European governments, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) oppose the Iranian clerical regime. They seek to overthrow the Mullahs in Tehran and replace them with a secular democracy which does not have nuclear ambitions; one which would not destabilise the region with funding for insurgents or terrorists. They are at this moment waiting on the Iranian border in a camp protected by the U.S. military in Iraq. And even though this army on their borders was disarmed in 2003, the politicians in Iran are rightly and obviously scared: tides of propaganda are published branding the group as Monafeqin (hypocrites).
In fact, Western governments owe their gratitude to the PMOI who were the first informants on Iran’s nuclear threat: it was their warning which alerted us of its existence. They have also helped identify many of the assassinations and terrorist attacks which have one way or another involved the help of the regime in Tehran. In the words of U.S. Gen. Ray Odierno in an A.F.P. dispatch on 10th May, 2003, it was clear in after the Iraq invasion that the Mujahedin “shared similar goals to the United States in forming democracy and fighting oppression” and that they had been “extremely cooperative”.
Why then are we not helping these people to bring about change in Iran? Why did the American military, upon invading Iraq, actually bomb their camp? Even now, why are they on our list of proscribed terrorist groups aside the likes of Al-Qaeda? Why are their funds frozen and activities prohibited? And why are the governments in the US, Canada and EU, which proscribe them, so determined to continue doing so, despite wide support amongst their elected representatives for the PMOI?
The lengths to which the European Council has gone to preserve the PMOI’s terrorist status are quite severe. In December 2006, the European Court of Justice’s Court of First Instance ruled that the PMOI should not be on the terrorist list, and that in fact they never should have been. In the following January, the Council of the European Union ignored this, maintaining its designation as a terrorist organisation. Why, again, is there such a determination to halt any suggestion of an Iranian resistance movement?
The answer is given to us by the very officials who are responsible for this policy. On the 21st October 2004, the European Union’s representatives prepared to negotiate with visiting Iranian politicians, publishing a briefing on their approach to halting Iran’s nuclear threat. If Iran cooperated, they would have promised the following:
We would cooperate in the prevention and suppression of terrorist acts in accordance with respective legislation and regulations. We would continue to regard the MEK [the Iranian resistance movement] as a terrorist organization.
It is clear that the Iranian resistance movement is used as a bargaining chip with Iran’s government. Indeed, when the PMOI was first placed on the American terrorist list in 1997, an unnamed senior official in the Clinton administration told the Los Angeles Times that “The inclusion of the People’s Mujahedin was intended as a goodwill gesture to Tehran and its newly elected moderate President Mohammed Khatami” (Oct. 9, 1997). The same has been admitted to the BBC by Jack Straw in the past year. Did they really believe that Iran would change if these concessions were made? In the meantime, millions of barrels of Iranian oil continue to pour into the European and American markets.
To complicate matters, the record of the PMOI itself is often questioned. It is regarded by some as overly populist with a personality cult surrounding its leader, Maryam Rajavi. The organisation Human Rights Watch have also accused it of having a questionable record concerning its own human rights, although this was strongly contested by many including a coalition of MEPs. Nevertheless, none of these accusations constitute terrorism. So why are they on our terrorist list?
Even in the event that the European Council is justified in negatively labelling the PMOI through possessing damning evidence of its terrorist involvement, the secrecy and refusal to act according to the ECJ’s ruling leave a distinctly foul flavour in the mouth of impartial observers. Where is the democratic civil society which is supposed to hold these governments to account?
It is quite clear that the Iranian government wants supposed western enemies to hinder the PMOI for the sake of its own stability. It is also clear that they are getting what they want. For the public who elect these governments, the question of Iranian appeasement is ultimately one of introspection. To what degree do we allow our government to place short-term advantages over their duty to safeguard our troops and civilians from Iranian-funded terror and insurgency? On top of this is the plight of the Iranian people who could be free – but whose oppression is perpetuated by our crippling of their resistance movement. At least one truth is clear: the fighting will never cease in the Middle East until Iran’s regime has crumbled under a democratic uprising of its people.
Stumble it!The wind has been taken out of the sails of this article somewhat by the November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which asserted that the Iranian nuclear weapons program was halted in 2003. Nonetheless, some of the stranger assertions in this article need challenging.
Such as, “the fighting will never cease in the Middle East until Iran’s regime has crumbled under a democratic uprising of its people”
While few would argue against the overthrow of the current regime (many might be suspicious of whether Western-backed Iranian “democracy” would represent the mess next door in Iraq), the idea that violence in the Middle East will evaporate altogether with the end of the Islamic Republic is bizarre and almost uniquely extreme. That there is relatively small Iranian involvement in the Iraq conflict isn’t especially controversial, but to view the insurgency as an Iranian creation is laughable. Lets start with the obvious: the insurgents were originally northern Sunnis, and the vast majority (95%+) of insurgents in Iraq are native. Over 40% of foreign fighters in Iraq come from Saudi Arabia, our friendly client state in the region, another theocratic tyranny with a far worse human rights record, but which remains unmentioned in the article. The second largest contributor to the foreign ranks of the insurgency is our new friend Libya, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, then Turkey. Compared to the presence of Sunni Arab militants, the Iranian influence is limited, and seems to be largely a neurosis of the Americans and Sunni establishment. Pointing to the scattered evidence of Iranian weapons in Iraq is strange given the amount of money and weaponry the coalition and Saudis are sinking into the Sunni warlords (or “concerned citizens”, as the US calls them) former insurgents who have chosen to wait out the occupation and get foreign help in eliminating their competitors in Al-Qaeda in the interim.
Its hard to see how “the fighting” would stop in the middle east with the removal of the Mullahs. The Islamic Republic, for all its obsession with the military, has never invaded another country. On the contrary, its defining military conflict was defensive, against a US-supported Iraqi invasion. Its no profound act to compare the “profoundly destabilising effect” of Iran to the gallant regional interventions by Israel, Turkey, the US and the UK. Iran has never colonised a country in the region, for instance, has never destroyed the infrastructure of a neighbour, has never annexed their territories, privatized their resources under foreign ownership, bombed and raided with scant regard for international law, or used illegal chemical weapons in said conflicts, as the above have. To any rational observer, the prerequisites of a less violent middle east would be an independent and viable Palestinian State, swift implementation of the inevitable western withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and an end to neocolonialist adventures in the region generally. To lay the blame for Middle-Eastern violence in Tehran even overlooks simple matters such as the religious identity of the Islamist vanguardists proliferating in the aftermath of the Iraq, Sunni muslims who view the Shia as heretics, or the history of Palestine.
But of course, the creation of myths requires the pruning of factual details. Only this way can we see a warmongering Iran, an existential threat, who we must counter without soft appeasement from the politicians. All the implications of this – that we are fighting a defensive war in Iraq, that we need to protect “our” “troops and civilians” (does this mean British or Iraqis? Are terrorist attacks in Britain being blamed on Iran here?) against foreign intervention, that the Iraqis want us there, that the Iranian government is a monolith etc. - are incomprehensible to anyone with an interest in reality. Iranians have no interest in a democracy that serves the interests of the hated western regimes, however much they despise the current government.