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Iranian Exiles Embrace Israel’s Drive to Scuttle the Nuclear Agreement Muhammad Sahimi |
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Since July 14 when the Vienna nuclear agreement
between Iran and P5+1 – the five permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council plus Germany – was announced, its opponents have been waging
an all-out war against it. In particular, the same pundits who lied to us to lead the
United States to a catastrophic war in Iraq are doing the same again, this time
against Iran. But, one opposition group is most interesting because it consists
of some of the Iranian exiles living in the United States. I am not talking
about the Mujahedin-e Khalgh (MEK) that, up until a few years ago was listed by
the United States as a terrorist organization. The MEK is despised by the vast
majority of the Iranian people for its collaboration with Iraq during its war
with Iran. I am talking about another group of exiles who have been acting as
the “post-modern fifth column” of
the agreement’s opponents, and have been repeating verbatim the lies,
exaggerations, and fabrications uttered by Benjamin Netanyahu and his
neoconservatives and Republican allies.
Such Iranian exiles argue that once
the economic sanctions are lifted, (1) Iran will receive up to $150 billion (a
great exaggeration, as the true number is close to $50 billion) of its frozen assets and will spend it to support its proxies and
allies in the region, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Bashar al-Assad’s
regime in Syria; (2) Iran will become an even more aggressive expansionist
power, beyond the four countries in which it currently has influence, namely,
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and (iii) the agreement only delays, but does
not stop Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
After the reform movement led by
former President Mohammad Khatami was contained and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to
power in 2005, many political activists that had even been imprisoned by the
hardliners moved to the United States. Some of them hoped that they can
persuade the George W. Bush administration to confront the Islamic Republic
forcefully. Others called for help from the United States to topple the regime
in Tehran. The neocons were
also looking for some Iranian versions of Ahmed Chalabi, their Iraqi
ally prior to invasion of Iraq.
Thus, some of the exiles received
fellowships at right-wing institutions, such as National Endowment for Democracy
that has played a significant role in inciting “color revolutions”
around the globe. Some were given jobs and visiting positions at one of leading
lobbies of Israel in the United States, namely, the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy (here and here), while others
worked at the neocons hub, the American
Enterprise Institute, and another
pillar of Israel lobby, The Foundations for Defense of Democracies (here and here). One of them,
Akbar Atri, was even made
a member of the
right-wing The Committee on the Present Danger. Two of them spoke in a panel organized by the FDC and
sponsored by two Iran hawks, former Senators Rick Santorum and Joe Lieberman (Atri supported U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan and Iraq). Some of them have testified in Congress,
urging stronger actions against Iran.
During 2010-2011 Israel’s rhetoric
against Iran intensified. Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense
Minister, just revealed that Israel
almost attacked Iran during that period. In November 2011 the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued its controversial report on
the status of Iran’s nuclear program, which was used by Israel and its
supporters to advocate military attacks on Iran.
Shortly thereafter, a group of 175
Iranian exiles [later expanded to 184] issued a statement in
which they essentially repeated Israel’s accusations, claiming that the Iranian
government’s “intention of diverting its nuclear program into a military course
has entered into a decisive phase,” a lie that even the politicized IAEA
under its Director-General Yukiya Amano has not
claimed. They also demanded “an immediate cessation of all military aspects of
the nuclear program [of Iran],” a pure fabrication, as the National
Intelligence Estimate of the United States in November 2007 (and re-affirmed in
2009, 2011, and 2012) stated that
Iran stopped its nuclear weapon research program [if it ever had one]
sometime in 2003.
A large number of signatories from
the same group recently issued a statement,
opposing the nuclear agreement. Calling the nuclear agreement “appeasing Iran,”
they declared that they “are sounding the alarm bells before it is too late,”
eerily similar to what the Israeli and American far right have been espousing.
These exiles often hide behind
“defending” human rights of Iranian people. True, these rights are systematically
violated by the regime in Tehran. But, why will strengthening the sanctions
against Iran and rejecting the Vienna agreement that will surely lead to a war
with Iran help the cause of defending human rights in Iran?
The Iranian exiles have also been
placing articles in right-wing newspapers and websites, warning about the
dangers of rapprochement with Iran and the nuclear deal. For example, Saeed
Ghasseminejad who is an associate fellow at the FDC, claimed in an article
published on August 17 by Weekly Standards, the mouthpiece of the
neocons that every investment in Iran will “flow” to the IRGC, the backbone of Iran’s
military. In another article
published by New York Daily News on August 16, Ghasseminejad referred to
the Vienna agreement as “a raw deal for Iran’s dissidents.” He was also quoted
by another right-wing outlet, The Tower, saying, “Increased engagement with Iran will lead to worse repression.”
Another of the exiles, Mehdi Khalaji
who works at the
Washington Institute, published an op-ed in the New York Times in
which he repeated another claim of the Israel lobby and the neocons, namely,
that Iran is an expansionist power, has been so for 400 years and will be even
more so after the nuclear agreement. But, the fact is Iran has not attacked a
single country for nearly 300 years; Khalaji simply fabricated a “new” history.
Another exile, Djavad Khadem, a
minister in the government of Shapour Bakhtiar,
the last Prime Minister under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi right before the 1979
Revolution wrote in a piece in November 2014
that, “President Obama appears ready to… misperceiving the Islamic Republic as
a stable country in a chaotic region,” and threatened that if the President
does not tie the nuclear agreement to a “stable Iran” – code words for regime
change - then “desperate Iranians would pick up arms to defend their right to
exist.”
In an opinion piece published by Times
of Israel in January 2013, Ghasseminejad protested selection of Chuck Hagel
as U.S. Defense Secretary, claiming that “Tehran votes yes to Hagel.” In another piece published in
June 2013 by the same newspaper, Ghasseminejad repeated verbatim the worn out claim by Netanyahu
that Iranian leaders have an “apocalyptic” view of the world. In yet a third article there published in
April 2013, Ghasseminejad claimed that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei “continues
to pursue a nuclear bomb and recently reiterated that he will not hesitate to
destroy Haifa and Tel Aviv,” without mentioning that Khamenei made the threat if
Israel attacks Iran first. In another piece published by Jewish Chronicles Online, Ghasseminejad
mocked Iran’s presidential elections of June 2013, and essentially said about
President Hassan Rouhani what Netanyahu said three months later in October 2013
when he said that Rouhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothes. And, in yet another article published in June
2013 by the ultra-right National Post of Canada, Ghasseminejad called
for regime change in Tehran, ”The only hope for Iran is regime change — which
must be the goal of Western foreign policy.” This group has also published tens of articles in Farsi in
which they argued for and supported the sanctions against Iran, with one of
them likening the sanctions to “surgery on cancer.”
The exiles have been fierce
proponents of the crippling economic sanctions that have disrupted the lives of
tens of millions of ordinary Iranians. Atri, for example, said in a June 2012 event at the AEI that “Iranians have paid a high price because of sanctions,” but
adding that he supports “even the extreme sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking
sector.” This is while he and his wife lead a luxurious life near Washington.
He warned against lifting the sanctions even in exchange for Tehran making
major concessions (which Iran has actually made).
Ahmad Batebi, a former
political prisoner who was tortured in jail,
collaborated with Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, an
organization setup specifically by Israel lobby AIPAC for
opposing the nuclear deal and made a video that was
broadcast by CNN, NBC, and other TV channels. In the video Batebi describes his
torture and warns against the nuclear deal.
The exiles also
have many websites and “non-profit” organizations through which they espouse
their views and those of their benefactors. Atri, for example, founded E-Collaborative
for Civic Education,
and runs a website Tavaana. It produces books, articles, translations of foreign texts
into Farsi, etc. It has a “faculty”
that carries out the work with contracts and includes many of the exiles that have
supported the sanctions, with at least one of them calling for breaking Iran up,
if the Islamic Republic cannot be toppled. It receives funding from the U.S. State Department, National Endowment
for Democracy and United States Agency for International Development, among
others. Other websites, such as Bamdad Khabar and Khodnevis, are also run by the same type of Iranian exiles.
Interestingly, even
some of the neoconservatives are wary about such Iranian exiles. Back in 2006
Kenneth Timmerman who is the director of Foundation for Democracy in Iran complained, “[Former] reformers
…. have gotten the lion's share of the
'pro-freedom' moneys from the State Department.” Timmerman was probably worried
that his piece of the “pie” – funds for the opposition to the Islamic Republic
– was shrinking, but the relevant question is, what has been the net useful
result of providing so much funding to these exiles, at least as far as the
lives of ordinary Iranians are concerned?
Originally published by Middle East Eye
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