Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Taking Bankruptcy of America’s Iran Policy to a New Low

By Delisting the MEK, the Obama Administration is Taking the Moral and Strategic Bankruptcy of America’s Iran Policy to a New Low

The U.S. Department of State took the moral and strategic bankruptcy of America’s Iran policy to a new low today, by notifying Congress that the Obama administration intends to remove the mojahedin-e khalq (MEK) from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).

At a macro level, we are disdainful—even scornful—of the U.S. government’s lists of both FTOs and state sponsors of terrorism. We have seen too many times over the years just how cynically American administrations have manipulated these designations, adding and removing organizations and countries for reasons that have little or nothing to do with designees’ actual involvement in terrorist activity. So, for example, after Saddam Husayn invaded the fledgling Islamic Republic in 1980—on September 22, no less—and starting killing large numbers of innocent Iranians, the Reagan administration (which came to office in January 1981) found a way to remove Iraq from the state sponsors list, in order to remove legal restrictions prohibiting the U.S. government from helping Saddam prosecute his war of aggression as robustly as the administration wanted. (During that war, the MEK—after having tried but failed to bring down the Islamic Republic through a bloody campaign of terrorist bombings and assassinations conducted against the new Iranian government’s upper echelons—ended up collaborating with an Iraqi government regularly carrying out chemical weapons attacks against targets, civilian as well as military, inside Iran.) But, when the same Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration couldn’t get Iraq back on the state sponsors list fast enough. We are very skeptical that Saddam’s ties to groups that the United States considers terrorist organizations changed all that much during this period.

Yet, precisely because we know how thoroughly corrupt and politicized these designations really are, we recognize their significance as statements of U.S. policy. Today, the Obama administration made a truly horrible statement about U.S. policy toward Iran.

The statement is horrible even if one wants to believe that FTO designations have some kind of procedural and evidentiary integrity about them. (We don’t, but we also recognize that letting go of illusions is often not easy.) Just this year, U.S. intelligence officials told high-profile media outlets that the MEK is actively collaborating with Israeli intelligence to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, Iranian officials have made the same charge. Since when did murdering unarmed civilians (and, in some instances, members of their families as well) on public streets in the middle of a heavily populated urban area (Tehran) not meet even the U.S. government’s own professed standard for terrorism? Of course, one might rightly point out that the United States is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians across the Middle East. But Washington generally strives to maintain the fiction that it did not intend for those innocents to die as a (direct and foreseeable) consequence of U.S. military operations and sanctions policies. (You know, the United States didn’t really mean for those people to die, but, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “Stuff happens.”) Here, the Obama administration is taking an organization that the U.S. government knows is directly involved in the murder of innocent people and giving this group Washington’s “good housekeeping seal of approval.”

But, to invoke Talleyrand’s classic observation that a certain action was “worse than a crime—it was a mistake,” delisting the MEK is not just a moral abomination; it is a huge strategic and policy blunder. It is hard to imagine how the Obama administration could signal more clearly that, even after the President’s presumptive reelection, it has no intention of seeking a fundamentally different sort of relationship with the Islamic Republic—which would of course require the United States to accept the Islamic Republic as a legitimate political entity representing legitimate national interests.

Count on this: once the MEK is formally off the FTO list—a legally defined process that will take a few months to play out—Congress will be appropriating money to support the monafeqin as the vanguard of a new American strategy for regime change in Iran. In the 1990s, similar enthusiasm for Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress—who were about as unpopular among Iraqis as the MEK is among Iranians—led to President Clinton’s signing of the Iraq Liberation Act, which paved the way for George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The chances for such a scenario to play out with regard to Iran over the next few years—with even more disastrous consequences for America’s strategic and moral standing—got a lot higher today.

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Race For Iran

September 23, 2012 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Mujahedin Khalq ; New Chalabi for the West

WHITE HOUSE SUPPORT FOR MIDDLE EAST ‘UPRISINGS’ DEPENDS ON HOW AND WHETHER THEY CAN BE USED AGAINST IRAN

Our friend David Frum published an interesting post, “America Can’t Afford to Ignore the Chaos in Supporting MEK; West feckless attempts to manipulate Iran’s politics Bahrain”, see here. David makes some points with which we agree, as when he writes that “An entire American carrier battle group is based in Bahrain—there is no way the United States can avoid being implicated in the actions of the Bahraini government.” But we were disturbed by his bottom-line policy recommendation for the United States:

“Always and ever: Iran is the big play in the Middle East…Every regional decision has to be measured against the test: Is this moving us closer to—or further from—a positive change in the Iranian political system? That test should guide decisions about Bahrain and about a lot more than Bahrain.”

One of the reasons we were struck by David’s recommendation—and keep in mind that he is one of the most prominent and thoughtful neoconservatives to be found—is that it already seems to have been taken on board by President Obama and his administration (though they have not explained it anywhere near as clearly as David did). On that point, David Sanger of The New York Times told National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm on Friday, see here, that President Obama believes the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere “could create an alternative narrative to Al-Qaeda and an alternative narrative to Iran that the United States ought to make use of”.

It is in this context that we should understand why the Obama Administration, literally seven hours after Omar Soliman announced that Hosni Mubarak would step down as Egypt’s President after all, called the White House press corps back in and, as Sanger put it, “all but urged the protestors” in Iran, such as they were, “to get out and do more”. The Administration has clearly decided, as America’s strategic position in the Middle East erodes before our eyes, to “push back” against the Islamic Republic, in multiple ways.

Some of those ways will be more feckless attempts to manipulate Iran’s internal politics—as with the Obama Administration’s exhortations for domestic unrest in Iran. We were appalled to learn recently that the Administration is considering lifting the MEK’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization.

On that point, Bill Clinton’s Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, retired U.S. Army General Hugh Shelton, added his voice to those of retired generals James Jones—President Obama’s former national security adviser—and Anthony Zinni, calling for the MEK’s rehabilitation, see here. Shelton argues explicitly that Iran could exploit the wave of pro-democracy protests in the Middle East, and that, to forestall such a scenario, “Iran’s current regime is currently a government that needs to change”.

We have told every Obama Administration official and member of Congress with whom we have discussed the matter that it is hard to imagine a dumber, more counter-productive change in America’s already deeply dysfunctional Iran policy than to lift the MEK’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization and start supporting it as the “vanguard” of some mythical expatriate Iranian opposition. This would make the reliance of the Clinton Administration and the George W. Bush Administration on Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress as the keys to successful “regime change” in Iraq look enlightened by comparison. But the chances of this happening are, sadly, increasing.

In its desperation to look like it can still shape events in the Middle East in some meaningful way, the Obama Administration is looking for other ways to press the Islamic Republic. Just a few days ago, Steve Coll—Pulitzer Prize-winning author and president of the New America Foundation—broke the story in The New Yorker that the Administration has started secret, preliminary talks with the Taliban, see here.

From an Iranian perspective, this is simply one more indicator of America’s unique combination of perfidy and incompetence in Afghanistan. During 2001-2003, the Islamic Republic provided substantial cooperation to the United States in its efforts to unseat the Taiban from power in Kabul and destroy Al-Qa’ida in its Afghan sanctuaries. Iran cooperated with the United States, in part, on the basis of U.S. representations that Washington wanted an independent and stable Afghanistan which would not be under the sway of the Taliban and its chief external backers, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But Iranian officials warned that local populations would see a prolonged U.S. military presence in Afghanistan as occupation—a judgment borne out by subsequent events, as greater geographic penetration by U.S. forces since 2006 and the deployment of additional U.S. troops since 2009 have correlated directly with an escalating spiral of violence and instability. This, in turn, has once again empowered the Saudi- and Pakistani-backed Taliban, which has clearly made a comeback—to a point where Afghan President Hamid Karzai, now seemingly joined by the Obama Administration, judges that the only basis for a political settlement is power sharing with the Taliban.

As we have experienced directly, this leads Iranian policymakers to question not just America’s intentions in Afghanistan, but also its competence—and with good reason. If Karzai and the United States move forward on power-sharing with the Taliban, without engaging the major non-Pashtun factions (many of which have close connections to the Islamic Republic), it could, as Coll notes, “ignite a civil war along ethnic lines”.

And it is becoming apparent that the Obama Administration will back the Bahraini royal family in whatever level of brutality seems necessary to keep Bahrain in the “American camp”. In other words, the Obama Administration is responding to the wave of popular unrest across the Arab world by intensifying its pursuit of the sorts of policies that have so thoroughly alienated most of the Middle East’s inhabitants from U.S. foreign policy in the first place.

Race for Iran – by Flynt Leverett & Hillary Mann Leverett

February 22, 2011 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

With Engagement Failing,Obama Urged to Embrace MEK

WITH “ENGAGEMENT” FAILING, WASHINGTON VOICES URGE OBAMA TO EMBRACE THE MEK AND REMOVE ITS TERRORIST DESIGNATION

Predictably, the Istanbul talks have ended without positive results. And, it seems clear that the discussion came to a dead end over two issues:

–the Islamic Republic wanted explicit recognition of its right to enrich uranium which the United States (at least) was not prepared to do; and

–the United States proposed a plan for refueling the Tehran Research Reactor that was more demanding on and less rewarding for Iran than the plan advanced last fall.

As it is not clear when the P-5+1 might meet again with the Iranians and the Obama Administration’s efforts to “engage” Tehran are increasingly being written off as a failure, public discourse in the United States is already turning to a consideration of non-diplomatic “next steps”. The Obama Administration will almost certainly push to expand U.S. and international sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Beyond that, we also anticipate that there will be increasing calls for the Administration to embrace “regime change” as the declared goal of America’s Iran policy.

On this front, one of the more noteworthy developments is an accelerating campaign to remove the mojahedin-e khalq, or MEK, from the U.S. Government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Over the last few months, a number of prominent Republicans—including John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former White House homeland security and counterterrorism coordinator Fran Townsend, and new House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen—have been publicly agitating to delist the MEK. But this effort has now gone bipartisan and big time, including engaging the services of a Washington, DC consulting firm.

To document this last point, we link here to the video of an event held in Washington last week, clearly designed to build public support for delisting the MEK as part of a U.S.-led campaign for regime change in Tehran. The event was organized by Executive Action, LLC, which describes itself as “a McKinsey & Company with muscle, a private CIA and Defense Department available to address your most intractable problems and difficult challenges”. (Exactly who engaged Executive Action’s services for this event is not clear.) Featured speakers included not only Republican figures like Mukasey, but also retired U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni; former New Mexico Governor, Clinton Administration cabinet officer, and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson; former Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli; and retired Marine Corps General James Jones—who just stepped down, in November 2010, as President Obama’s first national security adviser. All of the speakers argued for bringing down the Islamic Republic and forging a new political order in Iran—and for embracing the MEK as the foundation of a new Iranian “opposition” capable of bringing about both of these objectives.

History, Mark Twain allegedly observed, doesn’t repeat itself—but it does sometimes rhyme. We are struck by how much the ongoing campaign to rehabilitate the MEK in Washington, as part of a broader, regime-change-in-Iran strategy, “rhymes” with a similar campaign in the 1990s and early 2000s to promote Ahmad Chalabi’s expatriate Iraqi National Congress (INC) to overthrow the Iraqi government. That campaign featured high-profile Washington lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations specialists, extensive use of media, and the recruitment of high-profile political figures and former U.S. Government officials to sell both the dangerous idea that coercive regime change was the optimal U.S. policy option and a completely detached-from-reality assessment that Chalabi and the INC could deliver on the ground in Iraq. The United States will truly deserve what it gets if it falls for this again with regard to the MEK and Iran.

Jones’ participation in the event is particularly appalling, and should unsettle those who reflexively defended the seriousness of President Obama’s commitment to “engage” Tehran, and kept insisting that Obama’s approach to Iran was fundamentally different from that of George W. Bush. After listening to his remarks, we challenge anyone to make the case that, for the Obama Administration, “engagement” with the Islamic Republic was ever anything but a Dennis Ross-style, “check the box” exercise.

Race For Iran

January 26, 2011 0 comment