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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

UANI, Joe Lieberman and the MEK

I only have a few words to add to Jim’s post about United Against a Nuclear Iran naming Joe Lieberman as its new president. Those words are: Mojahedin-e Khalq. That’s the ex-terrorist Iranian opposition group, often known as the MEK, that has campaigned tirelessly for decades for regime change in Iran, and Joe Lieberman is one of their favorite advocates in Washington.

Here’s a bit of something I wrote in June about Lieberman’s positions on Iran and the MEK:

As far back as 2008, Lieberman was joking—yes, joking, as if this were a laughing matter—about the “appeal” of bombing Iran. In a 2010 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that re-purposed many of the talking points Lieberman had used to push for the invasion of Iraq, he spoke of a six-month deadline—six months! in 2010!—for Iran to roll back its nuclear program before the U.S. had to seriously consider a military strike.

Lieberman’s been at it since then, too. In 2012, he said that a military strike could cause Iran’s nuclear program to “be delayed for enough years that we may hope and pray that there will be a regime change.” And that is the central point of Lieberman’s advocacy: he wants a U.S. policy of regime change. Just this month, he participated by video in a confab of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the ex-terrorist Iranian opposition group that relentlessly pushes for regime change.

“Inevitably,” Lieberman addressed the MEK members directly, “as individuals you may ask yourself: Is it possible that we can bring about a change of regime in Iran? And I want to say to you that it is. I’m confident that it is and it will happen.” The US, he said, “should be working closely with your resistance group.” The event was even the subject of a “sponsored report“—whatever that means—from The Washington Times that helpfully categorized Lieberman’s statements as “American support for regime change and the Iranian opposition.”

I mention this because of the raft of deal opponents who just won’t stop insisting that actually they don’t want war with Iran, they just want a “better deal.” If that’s the case, they ought to stop naming Joe Lieberman to prominent positions in their organizations. As it stands now, the hawkish former Democrat holds positions in several major anti-deal groups in Washington. Jim noted his roles at theAIPAC anti-deal spin-off (which has also promoted MEK materials in its advertisements), the American Enterprise Institute, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, adding to that now his elevation from advisory board member at UANI to being its leader.

Fellow board members who actually support the Iran nuclear deal, such as Graham Allison and its Lieberman’s immediate predecessor, Gary Samore, might take note.

But hawkishness on Iran is a matter apart from support for the MEK. The group is reviled in Iran; it has launched terrorist attacks there; many impartial analysts have described it as a cult. Eli and I have already written about UANI’s targeting of legal humanitarian trade with Iran, and how it belies its professed solidarity with the Iranian people. Now, we can add UANI’s promotion of a pro-MEK hawk to that score. What’s worse, though, is the group’s elevation of a man who has such a cavalier attitude toward war with Iran and who wants official US policy toward the Islamic Republic to be regime change.

We’ve seen this move before with the Iraq war, and UANI seems determined to have Joe Lieberman, who, as Jim noted, was Honorary Co-Chair of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, return to star in the sequel.

Ali Gharib,

About the Author

Ali Gharib is a New York-based journalist on U.S. foreign policy with a focus on the Middle East and Central Asia. His work has appeared at Inter Press Service, where he was the Deputy Washington Bureau Chief; the Buffalo Beast; Huffington Post; Mondoweiss; Right Web; and Alternet. He holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. A proud Iranian-American and fluent Farsi speaker, Ali was born in California and raised in D.C.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Anti-Iran Deal AIPAC Spin-off Relies on Iranian Ex-Terrorist Group

When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) declared war on the nuclear accord between Iran and world powers signed last week in Vienna, it put its money where its mouth is. AIPAC, Washington’s most influential pro-Israel lobby reportedly plans on spending $20 million over the next two months urging Congress to vote against the deal. But its efforts at a full frontal attack on the accord, inked by the P5+1 (the US, China, France, Russia, the UK, and Germany) and Iran is leading to some politically awkward alliances.

As part of its efforts to kill the deal with a congressional vote, AIPAC launched a 501c4 advocacy group called Citizens For A Nuclear Free Iran. The group, according to The New York Times, was “formed with the sole mission of educating the public ‘about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal,’” said spokesman Patrick Dorton. The Times reported that the $20 million budget would go to ad buys in as many as 40 states as well as other advocacy.

Now that the campaign is taking shape, the AIPAC spin-off appears to be relying on a typical, if troubling, ally of American groups and individuals opposed to diplomacy with Iran. Namely, two items on the website of Citizens for a Nuclear Iran, one of which was later removed, featured an exiled Iranian opposition group called the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

The MEK makes a cameo appearance in the television ad crafted by Citizens For a Nuclear Free Iran, the well-financed AIPAC spin-off, as well as on a now-removed news items on the group’s “Press Room” webpage—indicating that Nuclear Free Iran recognized a PR misstep by promoting the group.

MEK Footage in TV Ad

The ad Citizens For a Nuclear Free Iran is splashing across television screens the country over—which the group posted to YouTube on Friday—incorporates b-roll footage from a press conference held by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which the State Department deemed the MEK’s “political wing” (earning it a corresponding terrorist designation).

The footage in the Nuclear Free Iran ad shows Alireza Jafarzadeh, a longtime Washington-based MEK apparatchik, at the National Press Club using a pointer aimed at a satellite photograph. It’s not clear which press conference the footage is taken from (the MEK frequently holds these sorts of events). As Jafarzadeh gestures at the photograph, the slickly produced ad’s voiceover says, “Military sites can go uninspected” and the words “Over 50 military sites” flash onto the screen.

“We were not aware of this matter, though the statements and b-roll footage are in the public domain,” said Ali Safavi, who works with the NCRI, when asked about the commercial.

The MEK’s most prominent act since the 1981 bombing of Iran’s Islamic Republic Party headquarters—killing 73 party officials—was its 2002 public exposure of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and Arak heavy water production plant for plutonium extraction. Although the MEK claimed its clandestine network in Iran had unearthed the nuclear facilities, The New Yorker reported in 2006 that Israeli intelligence had passed the information about the sites to the MEK.

Since exposing Natanz and Arak, the MEK has periodically drummed up publicity for other purported blockbuster revelations; many turn out to be busts. This winter, as nuclear talks with Iran talks heated up, the MEK released a report they claimed exposed a secret Iranian enrichment facility. The report garnered much credulous press from right-wing media and even a mainstream outlet or two. But a blogger at the liberal site Daily Kos quickly noticed that the photograph the MEK claimed was a steel door to the secret facility had been ripped from the public website of an Iranian company that sells safes.

According to the Sunlight Foundation’s Political Ad Sleuth project, Citizens United for a Nuclear Free Iran has already inked 247 contracts to air the aid, some of which went into effect last Friday.

Promoting MEK’s Leadership Views on Iran Deal

Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran’s dalliance with the MEK, however, didn’t end at drawing footage from one of the opposition group’s press conferences. In the “Press Room” section of Nuclear Free Iran’s website, the group late last week reprinted an item from the right-wing Israeli news organization Arutz Sheva that promoted the MEK’s views on the nuclear deal.

(Screencaps can be viewed here and here.)

The Arutz Sheva piece is headlined “Iranian Opposition Leader in Exile: Deal Bad for Iranian People”—a headline that carries over to the Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran website—and paraphrases quotes from an interview with Maryam Rajavi, the co-leader of the MEK (her husband, Massoud, the other co-leader, has not been seen publicly in a dozen years). In the interview, according to Arutz Sheva, Rajavi condemned the deal and, in the words of the pro-settler news outlet, “called on the international community to work to replace the Islamic religious regime in Iran.”

On Sunday, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran pulled the Rajavi article from its “Press Room” page. No explanation was given, and a query on the issue to Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran went unanswered.

New Group’s Advisor Backs MEK

Pulling the article from its website may indicate that Nuclear Free Iran realized the potential public relations problems associating the group with the MEK could bring.

With bizarre Islamo-Marxist guerrilla roots, the MEK and its affiliates were listed as terrorists by the US State Department thanks to years of violence, including attacks against Americans and the Shah’s government in Iran in the 1970s and, after falling out of favor with Iran’s revolutionary clerics, the Islamic Republic. But the designation was lifted in 2012 as part of a deal to try to extricate remaining MEK members from peril in Iraq, where the group had fought alongside Saddam Hussein but was disarmed in the 2003 American invasion.

The MEK’s multi-million dollar lobbying campaign to get removed from the terror rolls gave it a newfound prominence in Washington. Its ardent anti-Iranian regime stance, robust lobbying operations and hefty political donations have kept up their favorable relations with many hawks on Capitol Hill—despite the group’s reputation for cult-like behavior and past human rights abuses against its own members. (For more background, see our February feature in The Intercept on the MEK’s history and influence in Washington.) Rajavi and her followers use their contacts in Washington to relentlessly push for overthrowing the Iranian regime—and making this goal official US policy.

Rajavi counts among her supporters one of Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran’s advisory board members: former Democrat and former senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman has made several appearances at MEK events, including this June when he appeared at a MEK confab in Paris. Lieberman told the audience there that the US “should be working closely with your resistance group”—making, in other words, regime change into an official US policy.

A spokesman for Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran did not respond to request for comment about whether it supported an American policy of regime change in Iran.

by Eli Clifton and Ali Gharib

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The WINEP Letter and the Bipartisan Fallacy

For the past week, a letter from a varied group of policy experts has been making the rounds, mostly as a case against doing a deal with Iran. More particularly, many of these experts have been opposed to doing this deal currently being hashed out in Vienna. The exact contours of the deal are unknown, but the broad strokes have been apparent since an April “framework” laid out the parameters for many of the larger issues. The letter, which was organized and released by the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), got a big write-up in The New York Times:
 

Five former members of President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem Iran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement”…
 
For the White House, the letter may raise the level of political risk in seeking approval of any final agreement. A judgment from Mr. Obama’s own former advisers that the final accord falls short would provide ammunition for Republican critics who have already said they will try to kill it when it is submitted to Congress for review.
 
The Times coverage and the letter, in turn, attracted some gleeful pick up among neoconservative hawks, not least Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page, which remarked: “Doubts about President Obama’s Iran diplomacy are deepening, and some of the gravest misgivings are coming from his former top officials.”
 
Enter Robert Einhorn, formerly a non-proliferation adviser in Obama’s State Department and a signatory to the WINEP letter. When the coverage started pouring in with the obvious framing, he complained that the letter’s intent was being distorted. Einhorn, along with another signatory who curiously spoke only anonymously, told Foreign Policy‘s John Hudson that the missive wasn’t intended to state a loss of faith in the Obama administration’s ability to negotiate a deal: “That’s not at all what the statement was about.” Then, in a post on the website of the Brookings Institution where he is a Senior Fellow, Einhorn lamented the interpretation of the letter as “an indication that those former officials had broken ranks with the administration and lost confidence in its ability and determination to achieve a sound agreement.” He went on: “As a signer of the group’s statement and a former member of the Obama administration’s Iran negotiating team, I believe such an interpretation of the statement is unfounded and distorts the statement’s significance.”
 
I admire Einhorn’s work. His level-headed analyses of Iran negotiations have been valuable resources for anyone dealing with the issue. But I can’t help but note that his apparent discomfort with the interpretation of the WINEP letter stems from his own naiveté. Surely he knows the players involved in the letter and he should have anticipated how hawkish commentators would interpret it. The records of many of the letter’s signatories all but ensured that critics would seize upon it as an admonishment of Barack Obama’s Iran diplomacy.
 
Opponents of Diplomacy
 
Einhorn wrote at Brookings that the WINEP group “included [those] who have serious reservations about some of the decisions taken by the administration in the negotiations and who fear that U.S. negotiators may make unwarranted concessions in their eagerness to finalize a deal.” He added, “Participants in the Washington Institute’s study group want the negotiations to succeed.” The first assertion is a gross understatement; the second is patently untrue.
 
One need only point to Joseph Lieberman, the former senator from Connecticut, on this second score. I recently wrote about how hard it was to take seriously any advice on Iran policy from a group that included Lieberman. Lieberman has nominally supported negotiations with Iran but in tandem with policies that would make the talks virtually meaningless. In fact, if Lieberman had had his way, talks would’ve been over long ago, and we probably would have already attacked Iran. As far back as 2008, Lieberman was joking—yes, joking, as if this were a laughing matter—about the “appeal” of bombing Iran. In a 2010 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that re-purposed many of the talking points Lieberman had used to push for the invasion of Iraq, he spoke of a six-month deadline—six months! in 2010!—for Iran to roll back its nuclear program before the U.S. had to seriously consider a military strike.
 
Lieberman’s been at it since then, too. In 2012, he said that a military strike could cause Iran’s nuclear program to “be delayed for enough years that we may hope and pray that there will be a regime change.” And that is the central point of Lieberman’s advocacy: he wants a U.S. policy of regime change. Just this month, he participated by video in a confab of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the ex-terrorist Iranian opposition group that relentlessly pushes for regime change.
 
“Inevitably,” Lieberman addressed the MEK members directly, “as individuals you may ask yourself: Is it possible that we can bring about a change of regime in Iran? And I want to say to you that it is. I’m confident that it is and it will happen.” The US, he said, “should be working closely with your resistance group.” The event was even the subject of a “sponsored report“—whatever that means—from The Washington Times that helpfully categorized Lieberman’s statements as “American support for regime change and the Iranian opposition.” Any group that includes Joe Lieberman, in other words, should be seen for what it is: decidedly unserious about negotiations with the Iranian regime.
 
Other members of the WINEP group should raise eyebrows—many of them scholars at WINEP itself. Take for example Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, who have respectively worked for and advised the Obama administration on Middle East policy. In 2012, they too wanted to put an ultimatum to Iran: to deal or face a military attack. Again, if President Obama had taken their advice, we would have already gone to war. Another WINEP signatory to the letter was Patrick Clawson, also a hawkish scholar who has long favored a policy of regime change.
 
Then there’s the head of WINEP, its executive director Robert Satloff, who in 2013 leveled a criticism at the then-recent Geneva interim deal with Iran that patently distorted its terms (upon learning of the errors, The New Republic, which published the piece, went on to update it without acknowledging the corrections). Satloff’s attack hinged on media coverage of the deal that characterized it as a “freeze” of Iran’s nuclear progress; he and I went back and forth about the characterization on Twitter. I was quite surprised, then, to see that he signed on to the new WINEP letter, which urged the administration to “extend the existing Joint Plan of Action”—the official name of the Geneva interim accord—”while negotiations continue. This will freeze Iran’s nuclear activity and international sanctions at current levels” [emphasis added].
 
One might be forgiven for doubting that such characters are serious about diplomacy with Iran. They have pushed for awful policies and sometimes by means of disingenuous criticisms, and their letter is organized under the aegis of a think-tank like WINEP, which was founded as a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Even if they nominally support the notion of getting a deal rather than going to war, their past utterances, if adopted, would’ve dragged us into war long ago. That doesn’t mean all the experts on the letter come from this school, but surely enough of them do that participating in it should have raised alarms for those who support a genuine compromise and nuclear deal.
 
Bipartisan Support for a Deal?
 
Einhorn, in his blog post, lauded the bipartisan nature of the WINEP group. “The significance of the statement is that this diverse, bipartisan group was able to come together on a number of reasonable and achievable recommendations for concluding an agreement that would serve U.S. interests,” he wrote. That’s all fine and well, but one can hardly be surprised that signing on to a letter with a bunch of harsh critics of the Obama administration’s Iran policy that includes several neoconservative hawks would not be seen as, well, a hawkish criticism of the Obama administration’s Iran policy.
 
The WINEP letter even includes a fine-print disclaimer: “This statement reflects the broad consensus of the group; not every member of the group endorses every judgment or recommendation.” That should give the signatories significant wiggle room; I expect the perpetual critics of Obama’s Iran policy, like Satloff and Lieberman, will object to whatever deal comes down even if it meets the WINEP letter’s conditions, whereas its supporters, like Einhorn, will find themselves supporting a deal even if the circumstances described in the letter are not all perfectly adhered to. Maybe I’m wrong, but one can’t deny the malleability of the positions held over time by the Obama administration critics on the letter.
 
I don’t doubt Einhorn’s noble goals and his own takeaway from the letter, but bipartisanship in this case seems overrated. I stand by my earlier assessment that partisanship could be helpful to the Obama administration in getting a deal. That’s because the main threat to a nuclear accord, from the American side, isn’t from the pundit class (whom, again, Obama has thankfully ignored). Rather, it comes from Congress. And the hawks in Congress—which is to say, mostly Republicans, and nearly all of them—aren’t going to come around, no matter what the WINEP letter says and who signs it.
 
On the Hill itself, the bipartisanship is likely not to come from supporters of a deal, but rather its detractors. Pro-Israel hawks among the Democrats will either break with the administration or with its implacable Republican critics. Take, for example, the embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ: he’s introduced legislation, which could’ve derailed talks if passed, alongside Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who opposes any talks and has compared negotiations repeatedly to Nazi appeasement. Menendez’s posturing is indicative of the prevailing bipartisanship in Washington, which hews closely to the line set forth by the hawkish AIPAC. And AIPAC’s demands for the deal, as Einhorn himself seemed to suggest to Foreign Policy, are designed in such a way so as to render any reasonable deal unacceptable.
 
That was the one small stroke of genius in the compromise struck that allowed the Obama administration to reluctantly endorse a bill giving Congress a review of the Iran deal. Importantly, the “poison pills” were stripped out of the bill, but more importantly it ultimately set the threshold for Congress to reject a deal at a veto-proof majority. That means if the administration can keep one-third-plus-one of either chamber in line, the deal will stand. Republicans won’t have to come around—and they almost definitely won’t—and there’s even enough wiggle room that they can peel off a few of the Democrats who stick to the AIPAC line. Pundit bipartisanship is lovely, but let’s be realistic about its limits in the actual corridors of power.
 
Photo: Robert Satloff of WINEP
 
About the Author: Ali Gharib is a New York-based journalist on U.S. foreign policy with a focus on the Middle East and Central Asia. His work has appeared at Inter Press Service, where he was the Deputy Washington Bureau Chief; the Buffalo Beast; Huffington Post; Mondoweiss; Right Web; and Alternet. He holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. A proud Iranian-American and fluent Farsi speaker, Ali was born in California and raised in D.C.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Reviving the Iran-North Korea Axis – More MEK Fabrications

When George W. Bush put Iraq, Iran, and North Korea into his infamous “axis of evil” speech in 2002, the three countries seemed to have little to do with one another— except that Washington didn’t like them (and they didn’t like Washington). Iran and Iraq were enemies, not allies, and the inclusion of North Korea was meant largely to underscore that the “global war on terror” was not a war on Islam.

With the Obama administration and the P5+1 racing to conclude a final nuclear agreement with Iran this summer, critics of the deal are also hurrying—to demonstrate that Iran remains a committed anchor in a revived “axis of evil.” In Iraq, crumbling under the weight of assaults from the Islamic State, Iran has expanded its influence in an effort to contain the spread of Sunni radicalism. For some commentators, Iran’s efforts in Iraq are part of a serious bid for regional hegemony. But the sad truth is that Washington needs Iran’s help to keep Iraq from becoming a failed state, so this part of a revived “axis of evil” has diminished traction.

Iran’s relationship with North Korea is a different problem altogether. Thousands of miles separate the two countries. There is no religious or ideological overlap. One country is negotiating in earnest with Washington while the other is maintaining an officially hostile attitude toward the United States. And yet the two countries have certain common interests. They both have nuclear programs, are subject to international sanctions, and have struggled with pariah status. Much of their cooperation is shrouded in mystery.

Because of this mystery, the Iran-North Korea relationship is ripe for exploitation, particularly by those who are eager to find a hammer to destroy the impending nuclear agreement with Iran. But if this is the only implement that critics can find to inflict damage, they’re scraping the bottom of their toolbox of destruction.

Allegations of Nuclear Cooperation

Iran and North Korea cooperate. On this point, there is no debate. They engage in bilateral trade, though Iran doesn’t make it onto the official list of North Korea’s top 10 trade partners. They signed a technical cooperation agreement in September 2012. Foreign ministry officials from both countries have made reciprocal visits. They occasionally make statements about their shared distrust of the United States.

As part of their bilateral trade, North Korea has supplied Iran with missile components, including two shipments since fall 2014 according to anonymous sources in the U.S. government. One common but unconfirmed estimate of the value of North Korea’s missile sales is $2 billion a year, which would vault Iran into second place behind China as a trading partner. Also unconfirmed is the assertion that Iran has provided North Korea with centrifuges that have been a central part of Pyongyang’s effort to acquire a second path to a nuclear weapon through highly enriched uranium.

Technical cooperation, and here we are moving further into more speculative territory, has included Iranian presence at North Korea’s nuclear tests and North Korean experts providing unspecified assistance inside Iran. The latest claim, trumpeted by anti-engagement activists like Alireza Jafarzadeh, is quite detailed:

A seven-member North Korean delegation, comprised of experts in nuclear warhead design and various parts of ballistic missiles including guidance systems, spent the last week of April in Iran. This was the third such nuclear and missile team to visit Iran in 2015. The next delegation is scheduled to secretly arrive in Iran in June and will be comprised of nine experts.

Moving further into the terrain of speculation, journalist Don Kirk writes in Forbes that:

North Korea is able to assist Iran in miniaturizing warheads to fit on missiles – a goal the North has long been pursuing – and also can supply uranium and other metals mined in its remote mountain regions.

“North Korea continues to supply technology, components, and even raw materials for Iran’s HEU weaponization program,” says Bruce Bechtol, author of numerous books and studies on North Korea’s military and political ambitions. Moreover, he says, “They are even helping Iran to pursue a second track by helping them to build a plutonium reactor.”

Based on this history of cooperation, critics of the nuclear negotiations with Iran have suggested that North Korea will offer a way for Iran to sneak out of its commitments. Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz argued back in November 2014 that

if Iran under an agreement can have some kind of research and development, knowledge exchange and participation in other countries like North Korea, then this is also the way to bypass an agreement by simply not doing it alone in Iran, but by cooperating with North Korea or other rogue countries.

Finally, at the furthest edge of plausibility, Tzvi Kahn argues in a recent Foreign Policy Initiative bulletin that Iran and North Korea have a “broader goal of undermining U.S. global leadership.” Here is the most unvarnished update of the Bush-era axis of evil, which goes beyond mere cooperation on nuclear issues to a concerted effort to oppose the United States at every turn.

Unraveling the Axis

Added together, these claims appear quite convincing. Not only is North Korea cooperating actively with Iran with conventional military hardware, it is also helping the country acquire a nuclear capability right under the noses of the International Atomic Energy Agency and in violation of several sanctions regimes.

But this apparent open-and-shut case for a return of the axis of evil minus Iraq is full of holes. Let’s take another look at the evidence.

North Korea and Iran may indeed conduct a brisk trade in ballistic missiles, though the figure of $2 billion seems particularly squishy. More careful analysts estimate that North Korea makes $1-2 billion from all of its missile sales. The U.S. government estimated that between 1990 and 2000 North Korea made $1 billion for all its Scud sales, and that included barter as well as hard currency.

The figures are not only inflated but also outdated. “Iran has likely exceeded North Korea’s ability to develop, test, and build ballistic missiles,” observed the Congressional Research Service in a 2014 report. Even though Iran still may receive occasional inputs for its short-range missiles, “Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper stated during a February 11, 2014, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Iran is not currently receiving assistance with its ICBM program.”

CRS is being rather polite. Relying on North Korea’s ballistic missile capability, particularly its long-range rockets, would be like importing your sushi from a landlocked country. Most of Pyongyang’s long-range missile tests have been duds (failed tests in 2006, 2009, and 2012; one possible success in 2012). If Washington wanted to ensure that Iran is saddled with an ineffective missile program, it should probably encourage missile cooperation with North Korea.

Perhaps most importantly, however, although such trade violates various sanction regimes and regional compacts, it does not constitute nuclear cooperation. The United States might not be happy that Iran imports or exports missiles to North Korea. But this issue is not currently on the table in the negotiations any more than Iran’s human rights situation, its military presence in the Middle East, or the nature of the government in Tehran.

The Nuclear Non-Link

CRS concludes that, despite speculation that Iran and North Korea have collaborated in various ways on their nuclear programs, “there is no evidence that Iran and North Korea have engaged in nuclear-related trade or cooperation with each other.” One major reason is that Iran, according to US intelligence estimates, stopped pursuing a nuclear program for military purposes in 2003. But even if there has been cooperation since then, for instance around North Korea’s nuclear tests, it would be of limited value for Tehran:

Although some analysts have argued that Pyongyang could provide nuclear test data to Tehran, the extent to which Iran could benefit from such data is unclear. North Korea’s nuclear weapons program to date has apparently been based on plutonium; Iran would most likely use weapons-grade HEU, rather than plutonium, as fissile material in nuclear weapons, at least in the short term. Although Tehran could provide Pyongyang with access to Iran’s enrichment technology, such access would be of limited benefit to North Korea because North Korea’s centrifuge appears to differ from the two types of centrifuges that Iran has installed.

If their centrifuge programs are different, did Iran really help North Korea with its program? The evidence suggests that North Korea indeed relied on imported technology in the early days of the program but from Pakistan, Russia, China, and even an infamous attempted shipment from Germany, not from Iran. More recently, North Korea has shifted to indigenous manufacture for its HEU program.

There has been one report of North Korea shipping weapons-grade uranium to Iran (it allegedly caused a spill at the Khomeini International Airport in 2002). And Israeli intelligence has also alleged that North Korea is helping Iran build a plutonium reactor. Although frequently cited, neither claim has been substantiated. The uranium shipment, if it took place, happened before the date when the United States has acknowledged that Iran abandoned its quest for a nuclear weapon. The plutonium reactor, the pressurized heavy water reactor at Arak, will not have the capability of producing weapons-grade plutonium as long as the final agreement with Iran goes forward—so North Korean cooperation on this issue is moot.

What about the very specific details of Iranian delegations visiting North Korea? The source of this information is Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian resistance group that resembles a cult more than a collection of dissidents and has received a “terrorist” designation from the U.S. government. MEK has proven quite unreliable in the past, for instance in its assertion in 2010 of a secret nuclear site near the Iranian city of Qazvin. More recently, MEK supplied equally detailed revelations about a secret centrifuge facility underneath a Tehran suburb. In his debunking of the claims, Jeffrey Lewis concluded in Foreign Policy that:

The MEK highlights Iran’s nuclear programs — real, imagined, and downright fabricated — as a way to build support for regime change in Tehran. Hemming in the Iranian nuclear program through diplomacy removes one of the MEK’s most effective talking points in favor of bombing Iran. They won’t go down without a fight.

To continue the fight, MEK has brought in a heavy: North Korea. But note that the reports describe a North Korean delegation that includes experts in both nuclear warhead design and ballistic missiles. If such a delegation has visited, they may well have focused entirely on ballistic missiles. After all, although the North Korean government has claimed to have mastered the miniaturization necessary to put a nuclear warhead on a missile, the jury is still out on whether these claims are true. There is also a big difference between having a capability and sharing that capability (note Kirk’s elision of this difference when attempting to make the nuclear link in his Forbes column).

In any case, the State Department responded immediately to the most recent allegations of Iran-North Korean nuclear cooperation that “we don’t have any information at this time that would lead us to believe that these allegations impact our ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.”

A Weak Partnership

So, if the arguments for past nuclear cooperation are thin at best, where does that leave the case for North Korea helping Iran “sneak out” of any agreement with the P5+1 countries? As an argument against the impending agreement, this is a particularly weak one. Let’s assume the worst-case scenario that the two countries have had such cooperation since 2003, despite evidence to the contrary. Bringing Iran into a compliance regime is the best way of monitoring any future bilateral nuclear cooperation with North Korea.

True, North Korea could supply Iran with data from its nuclear tests or perhaps slip some documents to Iranian officials of its reportedly successful efforts at miniaturization. But as long as Iran’s facilities are subject to inspections and its nuclear material kept to a low level of enrichment, this information will be of dubious benefit. Without an agreement, meanwhile, Iran and North Korea could cavort beneath the sheets and we’d have no way of monitoring their conjugal visits.

And finally, there is the least plausible assertion: that North Korea and Iran share a broader goal of undermining U.S. global leadership. This is a particularly odd argument to make when Iran is sitting down to negotiations with Washington. The leadership in Iran must be crafty indeed to believe that giving up a nuclear option and providing the Obama administration with a diplomatic victory will ultimately hobble the United States.

But the argument doesn’t hold up with respect to North Korea either. Pyongyang certainly indulges in extremely vitriolic anti-American rhetoric (including blatantly racist comments about President Obama himself). But North Korea has never cared very much about U.S. global leadership. It has much more parochial concerns – preserving its system, getting a leg up on South Korea, weaning itself from its dependency on China, and combatting Japanese hegemony. To achieve any or all of these goals, an accommodation with the United States could in fact be helpful. If Washington offered Pyongyang a deal it couldn’t refuse, North Korea would sever relations with Iran in a heartbeat (indeed North Korea seriously considered a missile buyout package from Israel back in 1993-4).

The new “axis of evil” with Iran at its center has even less explanatory utility than the fiction had on its debut in 2002. The attempt to drag North Korea in as a diabolus ex machina to destroy the incipient détente between the United States and Iran only underscores the paucity of arguments that the critics have at their disposal.

By John Feffer,

About the Author

John Feffer is the the editor of LobeLog and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is also the author, most recently, of Crusade 2.0. He is a former Open Society fellow, PanTech fellow, and Scoville fellow, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications.

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Mujahedin Khalq as an Opposition Group

Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) Lobby in European Parliament fails to deliver

Iranian Parliamentarians Discover Brussels
 
In 2010, when Iran´s then-minister of foreign affairs Manouchehr Mottaki visited the European Parliament in Brussels, he was greeted by protests from MPs. Some of them, known for their close links with the exiled Iranian dissident group Mojaheddeen-e Khalk (MEK), carried the picture of Neda Soltan, a young Iranian woman killed during the protests following the fraudulent presidential elections of 2009. They also tried to block the minister from entering the meeting room and even briefly scuffled with security guards.
 
The contrast with a visit of a delegation from the Iranian Majles to Brussels on May 6-7 could not be greater. Sure enough, the MEK tried to derail the visit by lobbying the MPs to adopt a resolution on capital punishment in Iran, which would have almost certainly led to the cancellation of the visit. When that plan failed, they called on Euro MPs to boycott the delegation.
 
In the end, however, the five member-strong delegation led by the leader of the “principlist” faction of the Majles Kazem Jalali did make it to Brussels, in the first such parliamentary visit in seven years. Apart from holding sessions with their counterparts from the EP delegation for relations with Iran, Majles members were received by the President of the EP Martin Schultz (a German Social Democrat) and the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Elmar Brok (a German Christian Democrat).
 
Regional Concerns
 
A growing realization of the converging interests between the EU and Iran accounts for this dramatic change. This time, the discussions in Brussels were not so much focused on traditional European concerns, such as Iran´s nuclear program and human rights, as on the situation in the Middle East. In a scenario of rapidly disintegrating states and spreading terrorist threats, European officials are discovering that Iran is among the most stable and predictable state actors in the region.
 
In fact, privately many of them are uneasy, to say the least, with Saudi Arabia’s newfound regional efforts to consolidate a Sunni front against the “Iranian threat.” In a curious twist, it is Saudi Arabia, and not Iran, that is increasingly emerging as a revolutionary Middle Eastern power. Its refusal to take up a seat in the UN Security Council in 2013, alleging the structure´s inability to take action against Syria´s president Bashar Assad and confront Iran, was already a harbinger. Now, many in Brussels view with apprehension the departure of the cautious King Abdullah and a newly assertive policy of rolling back ” Iranian influence” in Yemen and Syria.
 
The EU´s foreign policy supremo Federica Mogherini definitely doesn´t share the Saudi narrative of Iran being the root of all tumult in the Middle East. In fact, she sees the nuclear deal with Iran as a gate opener for engaging Iran on the regional issues, including in Syria and Yemen, which is an anathema to Saudis. Officials from the Mogherini-led European External Action Service (EEAS) now discuss the possibility of a regional dialogue with Iran, which is a sharp departure from her predecessor Catherine Ashton, who approached Iran as an exclusively nuclear problem.
 
The Problem with the Gulf States
 
A major obstacle to this re-alignment is, of course, the position of some EU member states. Shortly before the group of Iranian MPs arrived in Brussels, French President Francois Hollande visited Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two major buyers of the French arms. As the French-Saudi joint declaration makes it clear, both countries are looking to consolidate their cooperation, notably in the defence sphere. This explains why France is also the toughest of the P5+1 group of powers in nuclear negotiations with Iran, its positions closest to the Saudis and Israelis. The French government, of course, is looking for ways to boost the country´s struggling economy. But massive arms sales to the Gulf monarchies may carry a considerable strategic cost, namely in the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS) and al-Qaeda.
 
Iranian MPs are upset that no major steps have been taken to combat IS and al-Qaeda terrorism. There is some truth to these claims.
 
Although Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are formally part of the anti-ISIS coalition, their real actions seem to go in an opposite direction. Operation “Decisive Storm” in Yemen contrasts sharply with Saudi Arabia´s and its allies´ notorious lack of enthusiasm in the fight against IS. Bombing Yemen (including with cluster munitions, which are prohibited by international law) not only leads to numerous civilian deaths but also takes the heat off al-Qaeda, enabling it to regroup and liberate dangerous terrorists from prisons. And the anti-Shiite, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish hate campaigns emanating from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates show no sign of abating. These countries are providing pulpits for firebrand clerics and hosting “debates” on the convenience of committing genocide against Alawites (a heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam), like the one organised by al-Jazeera Arabic in Doha.
 
Iranian MPs also rejected the interpretation of the current strife in the Middle East as a Sunni-Shiite conflict. They pointed out that Sunnis and Shiites have co-existed peacefully for centuries and blamed Saudi Arabia for stoking the sectarian conflict in the region through its aggressive promotion and financing of Wahhabism. Supporting Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies is, in this reading, a recipe for a strategic disaster in the region.
 
Overall, this narrative lacks self-criticism as regards Iran´s own role in region´s woes—from its staunch support of Bashar Assad´s regime in Syria to the failure to rein in more effectively Shiite militias in Iraq, some of which have been accused of war crimes. But that does not mean that the Iranian narrative should be rejected out of hand. If the West is serious about the security of the Middle East, and its own security as well, it would be wise to use its close ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf regimes to confront them over their destabilizing activities, even at the cost of some lucrative arms deals.
 
The visit of the Iranian MPs to Brussels is another sign of changing times in the Middle East. Although a wholesale rapprochement between the EU and Iran may still be some way off, inter-parliamentary diplomacy has the potential to build trust, bridge differences, and eventually make a re-alignment possible. There is a need for more, not less, of such contacts. US Congress members would do well to join their European counterparts in a direct dialogue with Iran. The West, after all, does not have the luxury of choice in picking its interlocutors in the Middle East these days.
 ***
About the Author
 Eldar Mamedov has degrees from the University of Latvia and the Diplomatic School in Madrid, Spain. He has worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia and as a diplomat in Latvian embassies in Washington D.C. and Madrid. Since 2007, Mamedov has served as a political adviser for the social-democrats in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (EP) and is in charge of the delegation for inter-parliamentary relations between the EP and Iran.

Eldar Mamedov

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Tom Cotton Allies Himself with the MEK

Freshman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) garnered two profiles this week, one in The Wall Street Journal and another in The New York Times, highlighting his efforts to disrupt normal Senate procedure in hopes of adding “poison pill” amendments to the Corker-Cardin bill that, if passed, would give Congress a say in any comprehensive agreement reached between the P5+1 and Iran.

But in a Senate meeting room Wednesday, Cotton, seated alongside Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), may have outdone himself by joining a panel hosted by the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC), a front group for the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK or MKO).

Cotton and Tillis were not alone. They were joined on the OIAC panel by former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, Senior Belfer Center fellow (and United Against Nuclear Iran advisory board member) Olli Heinonen, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert G. Joseph, and the former director of the National Counter Proliferation Center, Joseph R. DeTrani.

The MEK, which has worked hard – and spent a lot of money — to gain respectability in Washington since its armed units surrendered to U.S. forces in Iraq in 2003, is believed to have been responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran between 1973 and 1976. Exiled following a power struggle in the early years of the Islamic Republic, the group fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. Following a lengthy lobbying and legal campaign that included the payment of substantial honoraria to prominent U.S. politicians and retired national-security officials, the MEK was removed from the State Department’s terrorism list in 2012.

The group, along with its numerous fronts in the U.S. and Europe, describes itself as Iran’s democratic government-in-exile but has little to no support within its homeland, according to independent Iran experts.

A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch detailed the group’s cult-like control over its members and a record of human rights violations designed to severely punish dissidents or would-be deserters.

But Cotton and the MEK share a common agenda when it comes to the nuclear negotiations with Iran. In a controversial video appearance from her Paris headquarters before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on counterterrorism last week, the group’s co-leader, Maryam Rajavi, recommended that the best way to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq was to pursue regime change in Iran. And, in January, Cotton, a protégé of Bill Kristol of the Emergency Committee for Israel, told an audience at the Heritage Foundation:

Certain voices call for congressional restraint urging Congress not to act now, lest Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always absent moderates in Iran. But the end of these negotiations isn’t an unintended consequence of congressional action. It is very much an intended consequence — a feature, not a bug.

Neither Cotton nor the MEK, in other words, thinks there should be any negotiations with the Iranian government.

It appears that Cotton, who has quickly displaced Lindsey Graham as the Senate’s most hawkish member, has decided that it is necessary – perhaps even politically desirable – to make common cause with a group that has committed serious human rights abuses, allied itself for some two decades with Saddam Hussein, and carried out terrorist acts, including against U.S. citizens and servicemen – all in the interests of sabotaging an Iran nuclear agreement.

As Rajavi herself might say, “Quel enfant terrible.

By Eli Clifton

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Poe’s Financial Ties To MEK May Explain Maryam’s House Testimony

Wednesday’s scheduled congressional hearing on “ISIS: Defining the Enemy” is rapidly shrinking in size. Two key witnesses are refusing to attend due to the invitation to testify that Ted Poe (R-TX), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, extended to Maryam Rajavi, leader of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK).

 Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and former State Department counterterrorism director Daniel Benjamin have both said that they won’t appear for the hearing after learning that Rajavi would also be a witness on the same panel. She is scheduled to participate via videoconference from Paris, the headquarters the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a MEK front.

 MEK, which the State Department removed from terrorism list in 2012 following a lengthy and expensive lobbying campaign, is believed to have been responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran between 1973 and 1976.

 The group, which went into exile after losing a violent power struggle in the early years of the Islamic Republic, aligned itself with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war and, despite claims to being Iran’s viable democratic government in exile, is widely believed to have little or no grassroots support in Iran. The group has long faced criticism from Iran specialists and rights groups such as Human Rights Watch that it has devolved into a cult based on devotion to Maryam and her long-missing husband, Massoud Rajavi. According to numerous accounts, the group exerts a high degree of control over its followers, going so far as to mandate divorces and celibacy for their soldiers.

But, as Ali Gharib and I documented in February, MEK’s influence in Washington, particularly with Iran hawks, has coincided with a flow of money from the group to American politicians, in particular, to embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) who is currently under indictment on unrelated federal corruption charges.

So why did Poe and the Republican majority on the terrorism subcommittee decide to invite Rajavi (a copy of whose testimony was obtained by Ali who previewed it Tuesday on The Nation’s website) Campaign finances may offer at least part of the answer.

Poe received $17,900 in campaign contributions from supporters of the MEK between 2009 and 2014, according to an analysis I conducted of campaign finance data. Surprisingly, nearly half—or $8,600—of the total flowed into his campaign while the group was still on the State Department’s terrorism list between 2009 and its delisting in 2012.

In 2013 and 2014, the group also paid for $19,671 in travel expenses (including business-class plane fare) for Poe’s travel to MEK events in France.

In contrast, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), returned a $2,600 campaign contribution from a MEK supporter in Virginia in 2013. “During routine due diligence by campaign staff, it was discovered that a few donors had associations the campaign was uncomfortable with,” a spokesman for Graham’s campaign told Politico. “In an abundance of caution, the contributions were refunded.”

Poe seems less concerned about the association. His insistence on inviting Rajavi adds to the irony of his chairmanship of the terrorism subcommittee (shades of Sen. James Inhofe’s chairmanship of the Senate Environment Committee).

With Ford and Benjamin out, Rajavi will be joined on Wednesday by only one other witness: Walid Phares, a pro-Israel Lebanese-American Maronite Christian with a long association with hard-line neo-conservatives and a terrorism “expert” for Fox News. During Lebanon’s civil war that raged from 1975 through the 1980’s, Phares served as an ideologue for the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of various Christian militias. Some of these militias carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September, 1982, in which at many as 3,000 Palestinians—mostly women, children and the elderly—were killed following Israel’s conquest of Beirut. Among other positions, he served as co-chairman of the Middle East working group of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisory team.

by Eli Clifton,

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Sen. Menendez Top Recipient of MEK-Related Campaign Funding

As readers of this blog already know, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was the top congressional recipient of “pro-Israel” campaign funding in the 2012 election cycle, the last time he ran for office, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He has since distinguished himself as the leading proponent among Senate’s Democrats of new sanctions against Iran. He has repeatedly co-sponsored sanctions legislation-with Mark Kirk (R-IL), the top recipient of pro-Israel campaign funding for the past decade-with the ostensible purpose of increasing pressure on Tehran to make far-reaching concessions at the negotiating table.

It appears that Menendez has also been the top recipient of campaign funding from donors with ties to the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK), the cultish group that was until recently included on the State Department’s terrorism list, according to a new investigative report published Thursday by LobeLogalumni and occasional contributors Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton on The Intercept website. The article,“Long March of the Yellow Jackets: How a One-Time Terrorist Group Prevailed on Capitol Hill,” details how Menendez, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, maintained a hold for some six months-from July 2013 until late January 2014-on an arms package for the Iraqi government that included 24 Apache helicopters. Menendez explained publicly that he was concerned about then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s record of attacks against civilians and his tacitly allowing Iran to use Iraqi airspace to transport weapons to Syria.

But Ali and Eli cite sources that cumulatively suggest that Menendez’s position may have been influenced by intense lobbying on the part of pro-MeK individuals, including the lobbyist for one of the MeK’s political fronts and Menendez’s immediate predecessor, Robert Torricelli. Menendez finally lifted his hold after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched their first major offensive into al-Anbar province from bases along the Syrian-Iraqi border, taking Fallujah and most of Ramadi.

As noted in the article, the delayed Apaches would not likely have been ready to be flown by Iraqi pilots by the time ISIL launched its January offensive even if the hold had been lifted six months before. But the fact that those six months were lost made Baghdad more reliant on the air power of the United States and other countries (including Iran) to halt ISIL’s advance some nine months later after the jihadi group and its tribal allies had captured Mosul and driven to within 30 kilometers of Kirkuk. Although it would be unfair to conclude that Menendez was motivated only by his sympathy for the MeK, sources quoted by Ali and Eli suggest pretty strongly that the issue played a role. As Iraq’s ambassador to the United States Lukman Faily told Ali in relation to his efforts to release the hold on the Apaches, “The issue of the MEK came up in most of my meetings with the House and Senate, especially the Foreign [Relations Committee].”

According to the article,Menendez accepted more than $25,000 from donors with ties to the MEK, making him the largest recipient from 2012, when the MeK was delisted that September, to the present. That’s not much compared to the well over $300,000 Menendez received from pro-Israel groups during the 2012 election cycle, but it was more than twice what was provided to the next biggest recipients, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).

In any event, the article casts light on the seamier side of the politics around Iran, and it’s a good read besides.

By Jim Lobe

About the Author:

Jim Lobe is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the neoconservative influence in the Bush administration. The Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS), Lobe has written for various outlets and was featured in BBC and ABC television documentaries about motivations for the US invasion of Iraq. Read his complete biography.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Spoiler Alert: Iran Hawks Take Wing Against Nuclear Deal

After a period of relative (and blissful) quiescence, the Iran hawks are springing back into action, preparing the groundwork for sabotaging any nuclear deal that may be reached by Iran and world powers by July 20 or shortly thereafter. While prospects for an agreement within that time frame remain uncertain — the most important sticking point by far appears to be the gap between US demands that Iran retain only a few thousand centrifuges and Iran’s insistence that it needs many more to meet its energy needs — the hawks (by which I mean the Israel lobby and its many allies in Congress) are taking no chances.

Officially, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ambassador here, Ronald Dermer, still insist that Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capacity whatsoever, even as Israel’s professional national security officials have reportedly agreed with US intelligence (and International Atomic Energy Agency reports) that Iran is fully complying with the Geneva Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) and that Tehran is engaged seriously in seeking a satisfactory resolution of the issue.

For now, however, hawks here appear to be taking their cue more from Netanyahu than the professionals, as this week saw clear evidence of their gearing up for a major fight both within and outside of Congress.

On Thursday, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce — who recently video-cast encouraging words to a conference in Paris organized by the (former) terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK) cult — and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Eliot Engel, released a letter they’d been circulating since late last month now signed by 342 other House members demanding that Obama consult Congress more closely on the ongoing negotiations and suggesting that Iran will have to satisfy Congressional demands on human rights, terrorism, ballistic missile development, and other issues unrelated to the ongoing nuclear negotiations before it will approve major sanctions relief. Here’s the most problematic passage:

Your Administration has committed to comprehensively lifting “nuclear-related” sanctions as part of a final P5+1 [US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany] agreement with Tehran.  Yet the concept of an exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction on Iran does not exist in U.S. law.  Almost all sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program are also related to Tehran’s advancing ballistic missile program, intensifying support for international terrorism, and other unconventional weapons programs.  Similarly, many of these sanctions are aimed at preventing Iranian banks involved in proliferation, terrorism, money laundering and other activities from utilizing the U.S. and global financial systems to advance these destructive policies.

Iran’s permanent and verifiable termination of all of these activities – not just some – is a prerequisite for permanently lifting most congressionally-mandated sanctions.  This often unnoted reality necessitates extensive engagement with Congress before offers of relief are made to Iran, and requires Congressional action if sanctions are to be permanently lifted.  With the July 20 negotiating deadline on the near horizon, we hope that your Administration will now engage in substantive consultations with Congress on the scope of acceptable sanctions relief.

Of course, President Barack Obama himself can provide a certain degree of sanctions relief under executive order as he no doubt intends to if a deal is struck. And there is no doubt that Congress has a role to play in lifting sanctions. But the letter’s assertion that there is no exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction against Iran under US law and that any relief can only be extended by addressing a host of non-nuclear-related issues appears calculated to sow doubts about Obama’s ability to deliver among Iran’s leadership, thus strengthening hard-liners in Tehran who argue that Washington simply cannot be trusted. That’s why more than two dozen groups, including Win Without War, MoveOn.org, Americans for Peace Now and the National Council of Churches, called on Royce and Engel (unsuccessfully unfortunately) to clarify the letter’s intent:

Demanding that non-nuclear issues be added to the nuclear negotiations at this time will only ensure that we get no deal and face the prospect of an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program or a disastrous war opposed by the American people.

… It would be a travesty if the very sanctions that Congress enacted under the premise of stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons proved to be the obstacle that blocked a nuclear deal.

(It may be worth noting that Royce has raised more money from “pro-Israel” PACs associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee than any other House candidate in the current election cycle, while Engel is number 4 in the rankings — only behind the just-defeated former House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor — according to the latest figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

While Royce and Engel were releasing their letter, on one side of the Capitol, Sen. Mark Kirk, by far the biggest Congressional recipient of AIPAC-related funding in his 2010 re-election campaign, teamed up with Marco Rubio, the keynoter at last year’s Republican Jewish Coalition convention, to introduce The Iran Human Rights Accountability Act on the other. Among other provisions, it would impose visa bans and asset freezes against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. It’s just the kind of thing that generates a lot of goodwill in Tehran. Indeed, one of the Act’s chapters could only be interpreted as “regime change:” it declares the “policy of the United States” to be laying “the foundation for the emergence of a freely elected, open and democratic political system in Iran that is not a threat to its neighbors or to the United States and to work with all citizens of Iran who seek to establish such a political system.” Another gift to the hard-liners in Tehran who are as eager to undermine their negotiators in Vienna as the hawks here are to blow up the negotiations.

On Friday came news of yet another letter that is circulating on the Senate side, this one from Lindsey Graham, who has long promoted military action against Iran, and Robert Menendez, who last winter co-sponsored with Kirk the Iran Nuclear Weapon Free Act of 2014, which itself was clearly designed to sabotage the JPOA. (Graham, incidentally, is the second-leading recipient of “pro-Israel” PAC funds in the current Senate election cycle after Cory Booker, while Menendez topped the list in the 2011-12 cycle, according to CRP.) Like the Royce-Engel letter, this new one attempts to prescribe to the administration an acceptable deal that would warrant sanctions relief by Congress, specifically with respect to verification and monitoring provisions, disclosure by Iran on possible military dimensions (PMDs) of its nuclear program, and enforcement mechanisms, including making Iran “understand that that the United States reserves all options to respond to any attempt by Iran to advance its nuclear weapons program.”

And, like the Royce-Engel letter, a number of the demands included in the Graham-Menendez letter seem certain to raise doubts about Washington’s good faith and/or Obama’s ability to deliver the sanctions relief Tehran wants. For example, it says “… Iran must dismantle its illict nuclear infrastructure, including the Fordow enrichment facility and the Arak heavy water reactor…” despite the fact that Iran has made clear that, while it is prepared to make major concessions to accommodate international concerns about both facilities, it is not prepared by any means to completely “dismantle” them. Similarly, the letter demands that Iran submit to extraordinary verification and monitoring measures beyond those provided under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Additional Protocol for “at least 20 years,” a time span that is certain to be dismissed as a non-starter in Tehran. In addition, it requires that Iran provide “full details about its nuclear program,” including PMDs, despite the fact that IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has said it will take much longer than July 20 before his agency would be able to acquire that information, even with Tehran’s full cooperation.

“While the letter is written in terms that are sufficiently vague as to be somewhat meaningless, it could be interpreted in ways that call for outcomes that are not in the cards and could be deal-killers,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA), told LobeLog Friday.

“The negotiation is now in the final days, so who do these members of Congress think they are influencing? The Iranians? The other P5+1 parties? While members of Congress have legitimate concerns and interests in the outcome, they should wait until there is an outcome,” added Kimball.

“At this point, they can only complicate the talks and make it more difficult to achieve an agreement,” he said.

Meanwhile, outside Congress, neoconservative and other hard-line groups and individuals are also mobilizing what feels like a concerted campaign. Thus, in the latest edition of Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the doom-minded and highly defensive duo of Dick and Liz Cheney conclude a lengthy article entitled, “The Truth About Iraq,” with:

[W]e should be clear that we recognize a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to Israel and to other nations in the region, as well. We should refuse to accept any “deal” with the Iranians that allows them to continue to spin centrifuges and enrich uranium. In the cauldron of the Middle East today, accepting a false deal — as the Obama administration seems inclined to do — will only ensure Iran attains a nuclear weapons and spark a nuclear arms race across the region. The Iranians should know without a doubt that we will not allow that to happen, and that we will take military action if necessary to stop it.

Meanwhile, the hard-line neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the ever-hawkish Foreign Policy Project of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) announced a policy forum for next Thursday, July 17, entitled, “High Standards and High Stakes: Defining Terms of an Acceptable Iran Nuclear Deal.” The forum will feature Kirk, Engel, Rep. Brad Sherman, and Sen. Dan Coats, who previously co-chaired BPC’s task force on Iran. Panelists, according to the announcement, will also include the FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Stephen Rademaker, and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations. Given this line-up, it would be most surprising if any of the participants diverted from Netanyahu’s definition of an “acceptable Iran nuclear deal.”

Both Rademaker and Takeyh are currently serving on the Iran task force at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). (Most members of the BPC Iran task force previously co-chaired by Coats moved over to the JINSA task force when the original BPC staff director, Michael Makovsky, was appointed to head JINSA last year.) JINSA announced Friday that its task force, which includes Dennis Ross, as well as Rademaker, Takeyh, and FPI’s Eric Edelman among other well-known hawks, will also hold a briefing on the subject July 28, apparently in the belief that a deal may be concluded by then.

On yet another front, The Israel Project launched Thursday its latest web campaign, “No Bomb for Iran,” complete with a scary black-and-white photo of a mushroom cloud and the slogan, “If Iran Goes Nuclear, Terror Goes Nuclear.” It, too, echoes Netanyahu demands to essentially dismantle Iran’s centrifuges (although it doesn’t say all centrifuges), in addition to “roll[ing] back” its ballistic missile program despite the fact that the administration has clearly stipulated that missiles are not now a subject of negotiation.

So, as the US and its P5+1 partners appear to be closing in on a deal with Iran, the hawks are taking wing. Oh, and AIPAC’s board is supposed to meet here next week.

Jim Lobe,

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Terrorist groups and the MEK

European MEK Supporters Downplay ISIS Role in Iraq

While the world watched in horror as jihadist extremists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized the Iraqi city of Mosul, some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) claimed that these actions were not carried out by ISIS, but were “part of a popular uprising” against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

At the same time that ISIS was reportedly committing mass executions in Mosul, these MEPs “disputed” that Mosul and Tikrit had been taken by ISIS, and announced the creation of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA), a “new NGO with the mission of improving the political and human rights situation in Iraq.”

The comments were made at a June 11 press conference in Brussels, according to a press release for the event.

The ousting of Maliki and the “complete eviction of the Iranian regime from Iraq” are the group’s primary goals, according to the press release of the EIFA, which has no website other than a Facebook page that was created on May 6.

There is no shortage of people arguing that Iran holds excessive influence over Iraq and that Maliki has aggravated many of Iraq’s problems, so why did these MEPs resort to downplaying the horrors of ISIS’ actions in calling for an end to Tehran’s hold on Baghdad?

A clue appears in the EIFA’s emphasis on the security situations of Camps Ashraf and Liberty.

Camp Ashraf became the Iraqi base of the exiled Iranian dissident organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, (aka MEK, MKO, PMOI and NCRI), in the 1980s after its exodus from the Islamic Republic following a power struggle and regime-orchestrated persecution.

The MEK, frequently described as a “cult”, was classified as a terrorist organization by the EU until 2009 and by the US until 2012, and has been accused of human rights abuses.

Despite its expensive claims to the contrary (MEK op-eds and advertisements regularly appear in Western media outlets), the NCRI, the MEK’s “parliament-in-exile” and political wing, has no popular support in Iran. In fact, the MEK sided with Saddam Hussein during the 1981-88 Iran-Iraq war and even attempted to take Iranian territory. The vast majority of Iranians inside Iran either consider the group insignificant or harmful to reformist efforts. The MEK is also despised by many Iraqis for its role in crushing Shia and Kurdish uprisings against Saddam’s dictatorial rule. Yet thanks to well-funded lobbying and advocacy efforts, the MEK has still been endorsed by some Western politicians in the US and Europe as a legitimate Iranian opposition movement.

Before setting its sights on the United States, the MEK, through the NCRI, embarked on a well-organized campaign to bring European politicians to its side. After years of unchecked lobbying efforts, the MEK has convinced some MEPs to advocate in its favor. In addition to the leftist groups who uncritically support the MEK because it claims to have Marxist beliefs (along with Islamic ones!), right-wing MEPs seem taken in by its fervent anti-Iranian government stance. It is therefore not surprising that the individuals endorsing the EIFA have also endorsed the MEK.

The foremost MEK-EIFA endorser is Struan Stevenson, a British conservative who chaired the European Parliament (EP) delegation for relations with Iraq in 2009-2014. Under his watch, the delegation has devoted disproportionate attention to the security of Camp Ashraf while almost completely neglecting the more relevant economic, social, security and human rights challenges facing Iraq. When the EP negotiated a 2014 resolution addressing the surge of violence in Iraq in February, Stevenson made every effort to downplay the involvement of ISIS, while directing all blame towards Maliki and Iran.

Another notable promoter of the EIFA is Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a Spanish conservative. During his tenure as Vice President of the EP (2009-14), he functioned as one of the NCRI’s chief supporters. The EIFA has also been endorsed by former Portuguese socialist MEP Paulo Casaca (2004-09), a self-styled “expert on Iraq” who reportedly employed a MEK member as one of his personal assistants during his parliamentary stint.

Seen in the light of their MEK connections, it’s clear why these MEPs are trying to downplay the role of ISIS as a serious threat to the stability of Iraq and the broader region. The MEK and its supporters view Maliki as an Iranian pawn and believe that if Maliki goes, the Iranian government (which the MEK detests) will suffer. So in following the proverb, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, the MEK’s supporters and ISIS have found a common cause in pushing for Maliki’s ouster.

Even though Vidal-Quadras, Stevenson and Casaca will not be serving in the incoming European Parliament as of July 1, the MEK will surely try to recruit more MEPs for its cause, including with new tools like the EIFA. Of course, whoever is approached by the MEK — and most MEPs will be approached if they haven’t already — would be wise to think twice about associating with an organization that attempts to minimize the acts of a group so murderous and fanatical that even al-Qaeda has declared it too extreme.

Photo: The European Iraqi Freedom Association’s (EIFA) June 11 press conference in Brussels featuring European members of parliament Stephen Hughes, Struan Stevenson, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, and Paulo Casaca.

by Eldar Mamedov

About the Author

Eldar Mamedov has degrees from the University of Latvia and the Diplomatic School in Madrid, Spain. He has worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia and as a diplomat in Latvian embassies in Washington D.C. and Madrid. Since 2007, Mamedov has served as a political adviser for the social-democrats in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (EP) and is in charge of the delegation for inter-parliamentary relations between the EP and Iran.

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