Ritter believes that the United States is using diplomacy less as a route to agreement than as a tactical tool to buy time, apply pressure, and shape the conditions for confrontation. In his remarks to the Tehran Times, he outlined what he sees as the real thinking behind U.S. and Israeli demands, warned against misreading Iran’s deterrence, and described the potentially catastrophic consequences of a war for the region in which the MEK, the monarchists and the separatist groups take part.

“The United States, on its own admission, orchestrates a currency collapse in Iran,” Scott Ritter told Tehran Times about the recent protests in Iran. “People went to the streets in legitimate protest, which the Iranian government did not violently suppress. Then that protest was hijacked by the CIA, by Mossad, with agents inside who created violence.”

Ritter believes that Israel and the U.S. are fomenting unrests to lead a regime change project in Iran besides military invasion. He explains: “So, when we bomb Iran—and I unfortunately believe that we will bomb Iran—we will be seeking to suppress the regime’s ability to respond to civil unrest. We will encourage uprisings and suppress the government’s capacity to respond. The objective, therefore, is to have the government collapse.”

According to this prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy,  this is American’s vision about Iran following a US-Israeli invasion on this nation: “you’re going to have ISIS-type trucks running through your cities, with gunmen from the Mujahedin-e Khalq and gunmen from the monarchists, who are going to run in and say, “We’re now in charge.”

Ritter believes that the Iranian government needs to capture the emotion of the Iranian nation and use it to weaponize itself, to make itself invulnerable to efforts by outside powers to divide it.

As an American, he says: “That’s what we try to do. We support the MEK, we support the monarchists, we support the Kurds, we support Azeri separatists, we support the Baluch, and we exploit economic divisions in the mainstream Iranian population. The United States, Israel, and others are looking to fracture Iran, to break it apart, to cause it to collapse from within.”

He suggests that the Iranian government and the Iranian people have to find a way to unify themselves. “If not, then we’ve just told you what we look for: the divisions, and we exploit the divisions,” he states.

Ritter has previously written on the role of the MEK as operatives of the US intelligence in Iran. In 2005, Ritter revealed that the MEK had begun receiving training from the CIA. In a 2006 interview, Ritter described the MEK as a “cult” and a “terrorist” group, accusing elements in the U.S. government of using them to destabilize Iran. Ritter has also noted that the MEK has often acted as a source of intelligence for Western and Israeli officials regarding Iranian nuclear sites.

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Kiriakou asserted that while CIA officers swear an oath to protect the Constitution upon entering service, many fail to uphold that commitment. Recalling his first day at the agency, Kiriakou remarked: “When I stood with about 300 others and raised my hand to swear to protect the Constitution, I had to conclude that I was the only one there who truly meant it.”

In 2002, Kiriakou was asked if he wished to be trained in “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He recounted identifying the initiative as a torture program and stating it was illegal. According to Kiriakou, officials responded by saying, “It’s not illegal; the President approved it and the Department of Justice authorized it.” He emphasized that he was the only member of a 14-person team to refuse the offer.

Addressing the assassination programs conducted during the Obama administration, Kiriakou described how then-CIA Director John Brennan met with White House and Department of Justice officials every Tuesday morning to finalize a list of individuals to be killed that week.

Kiriakou described the process in stark terms: “Once the names were agreed upon, teams would deploy across the globe to carry out the assassinations, only to reconvene for the following week’s list.”

He also touched upon the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” reminding viewers that sending suspects to countries where they are known to face torture is illegal. Citing the example of a Tunisian suspect captured in Afghanistan and rendered to Egypt, Kiriakou argued that such practices lack any legitimate legal foundation.

Regarding the recent unrest and street demonstrations in Iran, Kiriakou contended that these events are the result of a joint CIA and Mossad operation. Referencing public statements made by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Kiriakou stated, “We know this is a Mossad-CIA operation thanks to Pompeo’s own comments.”

Kiriakou noted that while the CIA does not typically maintain personnel on the ground, Mossad has an extensive field presence. He alleged that both agencies work in close cooperation with the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). He reminded the audience that the MEK had previously attempted to assassinate a US ambassador and was once designated as a terrorist organization before being removed from the list in 2009 during Hillary Clinton’s tenure.

Kiriakou also highlighted the organization’s lobbying efforts in Washington, noting that “everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Howard Dean began lobbying for the MEK.”

Commenting on the burning of mosques and fire trucks during the Iranian demonstrations, Kiriakou argued these actions do not align with demands for democracy. “If you are demonstrating for democracy and freedom, why would you set fire to mosques and fire engines? Mossad and the CIA want chaos in Iran,” he evaluated.

The program also addressed remarks by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent regarding the devaluation of the Iranian Rial. Evaluating Bessent’s admission that economic chaos was being used to trigger street protests, Kiriakou stated such actions fall under “covert action,” which requires presidential authorization.

“To implement a plan of this nature, one needs a ‘finding’—a document of authorization signed by the CIA General Counsel, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, the National Security Council, and ultimately the President,” Kiriakou explained.

Turning to Israeli operational methods, Kiriakou claimed that Mossad utilizes Afghan refugees in Iran for intelligence gathering. “The Israelis take Afghan refugees who are in desperate straits and have no access to state services, paying them $200 a month to carry out surveillance tasks,” he alleged.

In response to questions about whether Saudi Arabia possesses nuclear weapons, Kiriakou cited information from the legendary CIA operations officer Duane Clarridge.

Kiriakou stated that Saudi Arabia financed Pakistan’s nuclear program. “The Saudis provided the money the Pakistanis needed to develop a nuclear bomb as a counterweight to India. In return, I assume the Pakistanis have shared those bombs with the Saudis,” he said. While it remains unclear if Saudi Arabia possesses a missile system capable of carrying nuclear warheads, Kiriakou emphasized that their access to nuclear weapons is highly probable.

Evaluating the links between Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua and the influx of cocaine into the US during the 1980s, Kiriakou stated that the CIA’s role in this process is documented.

He noted that while the CIA armed Contra groups in the north, groups in the south were smuggling Colombian cocaine into the US, and the agency, at the very least, turned a blind eye to the traffic. Rejecting claims by his former colleague Jack Devine that the CIA was not involved in the drug trade, Kiriakou countered: “I believe Jack Devine is mistaken. The evidence shows the CIA facilitated the importation of cocaine.”

Kiriakou argued that Congressional oversight of the CIA has weakened significantly since the 1980s, signaling the end of the era defined by the Church and Pike Committees (1975–1982). He suggested that current intelligence committees act more as supporters of the agency than as overseers. “The CIA pushes the boundaries until someone pushes back. If no one resists, they gain new ground and they never give it back,” he remarked.

Finally, commenting on newly surfaced documents regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case, Kiriakou noted that the possibility of Epstein having ties to the CIA has strengthened. Kiriakou mentioned that Epstein’s lawyers had approached the CIA to confirm a relationship between Epstein and the agency, though no response was given.

“Epstein was seeking a role with the CIA, and it appears he had similar relationships with MI6 and the Israelis,” Kiriakou concluded.

Harici.com.tr

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Tom O’Connor, Senior Writer of the Newsweek suggests that “as Israel eyes regime change, Iran’s opposition is divisive and divided. He asserts that a number of observers argue that neither Pahlavi nor the MEK hold the necessary influence in Iran to substantially affect the country’s future.

In case of the MEK, he quotes Ali Alfoneh, senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Alfoneh told Newsweek, “The NCRI/MEK, which relocated to Iraq and collaborated with the Iraqi Army throughout the war against Iran, has been reduced to a cult-like political sect lacking any significant domestic constituency.”

O’Conner also has interviewed Muhammad Sahimi, professor at the University of Southern California, who has outlined a difficult situation for both MEK and monarchy supporters.

“The MEK has had long-standing relations with Israel, and they too hope that they can come to power, although they are universally despised by Iranians from all walks of life, due to their siding with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq during its war with Iran,” Sahimi told Newsweek about the MEK. “At the same time, their members are all in their 60s and 70s, and in exile. They are a spent force.”

The author also talked to Sina Toosi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Toosi argued that propping up either Pahlavi or the MEK could ultimately harm efforts for democracy in Iran.

“While these groups will likely seek to use the current crisis to boost their visibility and present themselves as viable alternatives, empowering them would be a grave miscalculation,” Toosi told Newsweek. “It would further discredit any externally backed initiative for political change and would undermine the broader Iranian pro-democracy movement, which overwhelmingly rejects foreign interference and sectarian or authoritarian alternatives.”

“Paradoxically, some of the strongest opposition to U.S. or Israeli interference often comes from grassroots civil society actors and reformist or moderate political currents, not the security establishment,” he added. “Undermining those internal voices—who support democratic change but oppose war and foreign manipulation—could inadvertently strengthen the very forces Israel and the U.S. claim to be opposing.”

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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessment has cleared the way for the board of governors to end the Agency’s extraordinary investigation into accusations of Iran’s past nuclear weapons work. But a closer examination of the document reveals much more about the political role that the Agency has played in managing the Iran file.

Contrary to the supposed neutral and technical role that Director General Yukiya Amano has constantly invoked and the news media has long accepted without question, the Agency has actually been serving as prosecutor for the United States in making a case that Iran has had a nuclear weapons program.

The first signs of such an IAEA role appeared in 2008 after the Bush administration insisted that the Agency make a mysterious collection of intelligence documents on a purported Iranian nuclear weapons research program the centerpiece of its Iran inquiry. The Agency’s partisan role was fully developed, however, only after Amano took charge in late 2009. Amano got U.S. political support for the top position in 2009 because he had enthusiastically supported the Bush administration’s pressure on Mohammed ElBaradei on those documents when Amano was Japan’s permanent representative to the IAEA in 2008.

Amano delivered the Agency’s November 2011 report just when the Obama administration needed additional impetus for its campaign to line up international support for “crippling sanctions” on Iran. He continued to defend that hardline position and accuse Iran of failing to cooperate as the Obama administration sought to maximize the pressure on Iran from 2012 to 2015.

When the Obama administration’s interests shifted from pressuring Iran to ensuring that the nuclear agreement with Iran would be completed and fully implemented, Amano’s role suddenly shifted as well. In late June, according to Iranian officials involved in the Vienna negotiations, Secretary of State John Kerry reached agreement with both the Iranians and Amano that the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) issue would be resolved through a report by Amano before the end of the year.

Based on that agreement, Amano would write a report that would reach no definitive conclusion about the accusations of nuclear weapons work but nevertheless bring the PMD inquiry to an end . The report was still far from even-handed. It could not be, because Amano had embraced the intelligence documents that the United States and Israel had provided to the IAEA, around which the entire investigation had been organized.

Dodgy Intelligence Documents

Iran had insisted from the beginning that the intelligence documents given to the IAEA were fraudulent, and ElBaradei had repeatedly stated publicly from late 2005 through 2009 that the documents had not been authenticated. ElBaradei observes in his 2011 memoirs that he could never get a straight answer from the Bush administration about how the documents had been acquired. Different cover stories had been leaked to the media over the years suggesting that either an Iranian scientist involved in the alleged weapons program or a German spy had managed to get the documents out of Iran. But in 2013, former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt revealed to me in an interview that German intelligence had obtained the documents in 2004 from a sometime source whom they knew to be a member of the Mujahideen E-Khalq (MEK). A cult-like Iranian exile terrorist group, MEK had once carried out terror operations for the Saddam Hussein regime but later developed a patron-client relationship with Israeli intelligence.

Quite apart from the unsavory truth about the origins of the documents, the burden of proof in the IAEA inquiry should have been on the United States to make the case for their authenticity. There is a good reason why U.S. judicial rules of evidence require that “the proponent must produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is.”

But instead Amano has required Iran, in effect, to prove the negative. Since it is logically impossible for Iran to do so, that de facto demand has systematically skewed the entire IAEA investigation toward the conclusion that Iran is guilty of the covert activities charged in the intelligence documents. And the Agency has reinforced that distorted frame in its final assessment by constantly making the point that Iran possesses technology that could have been used for the development of a nuclear weapon. Every time Iran produced evidence that a technology that the IAEA had suggested was being used for the development of nuclear weapons was actually for non-nuclear applications, the Agency cast that evidence in a suspicious light by arguing that it bore some characteristics that are “consistent with” or “relevant to” work on nuclear weapons. The “final assessment” uses that same tactic to frame not only Iranian development of various technologies but its organizations, facilities, and research activities as inherently suspicious regardless of evidence provided by Iran that they were for other purposes.

Another tactic the IAEA had used in the past to attack Iran’s credibility is the suggestion that the government actually made a partial confession. In May 2008, the IAEA had claimed in a quarterly report that Iran “did not dispute that some of the information contained in the documents was factually accurate but said the events and activities concerned involved civil or conventional military applications.” That statement had clearly conveyed the impression that Iran has admitted to details about activities shown in the documents. But in fact Iran had only confirmed information that was already publicly known, such as certain names, organizations, and official addresses, as the IAEA itself acknowledged in 2011. Furthermore, Iran had also submitted a 117-page paper in which it had pointed out that “some of the organizations and individuals named in those documents were nonexistent.”

The IAEA resorted to the same kind of deceptive tactic in the final assessment’s discussion of “organizational structure.” It stated, “A significant proportion of the information available to the Agency on the existence of organizational structures was confirmed by Iran during implementation of the Road-map.” That sentence implied that Iran had acknowledged facts about the organizations that supported the purported intelligence claims of a nuclear weapons research program. But it actually meant only that Iran confirmed the same kind of publicly available information as it had in 2008.

On the issue of whether an Iranian organization to carry out nuclear-weapons research and development had existed, the final assessment again uses suggestive but ultimately meaningless language: “[B]efore the end of 2003, an organizational structure was in place in Iran suitable for the coordination of a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.”

Similar language implying accusation without actually stating it directly can be found in most of the assessments in the document. In the section on “procurement activities,” the report refers to “indications of procurements and attempted procurements of items with relevance, inter alia, to the development of a nuclear device.” That language actually means nothing more than that Iranians had sought to purchase dual-use items, but it preserves the illusion that the procurement is inherently suspicious.

EBW and MIP

The use of “relevance” language was, in fact, the IAEA’s favorite tactic for obscuring the fact that it had no real evidence of nuclear weapons work. On the issue of the purported intelligence documents showing that Iran had developed and experimented with Exploding Bridge-Wire (EBW) technology for the detonation of a nuclear weapon, Iran had gone to great lengths to prove that its work on EBW technology was clearly focused on non-nuclear applications. It provided detailed information about its development of the technology, including videos of activities it had carried out, to show that for the objective of the work was to develop safer conventional explosives.

The IAEA responded by saying “ that the EBW detonators developed by Iran have characteristics relevant to a nuclear device.” By that same logic, of course, a prosecutor could name an individual as a suspect in a crime simply because his behavior showed “characteristics relevant” to that crime.

A similar tactic appears in the assessment of the “initiation of high explosives” issue. The 2011 IAEA report had recorded the intelligence passed on by the Israelis that Iran had done an experiment with a high explosives detonation technology called multipoint initiation (MIP) that the Agency said was “consistent with” a publication by a “foreign expert” who had worked in Iran. That was a reference to the Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, but he was an expert on producing nanodiamonds through explosives, not on nuclear weapons development. And the open-source publication by Danilenko was not about experiments related to nuclear weapons but only about measuring shock waves from explosions using fiber optic cables.

The 2011 report also had referred to “information” from an unnamed member state that Iran had carried out the “large scale high explosives experiments” in question in the “region of Marivan.” In its final assessment, the Agency says it now believes that those experiments were carried out in a “location called ‘Marivan’,” rather than in the “region of Marivan.” But although Iran has offered repeatedly to allow the IAEA to visit Marivan to determine whether such experiments were carried out,the IAEA has refused to carry out such an inspection and has offered no explanation for its refusal.

The Agency relies on its standard evasive language to cover its climb-down from the 2011 assessment. “The Agency assesses that the MPI technology developed by Iran has characteristics relevant to a nuclear device,” it said, “as well as to a small number of alternative applications.” That wording—combined with its refusal to make any effort to check on the one specific claim of Iranian experiments at Marivan—makes it clear that the Agency knows very well that it has no real evidence of the alleged experiments but is unwilling to say so straightforwardly.

The Agency did the same thing in regard to the alleged “integration into a missile delivery system.” A key set of purported intelligence documents had shown a series of efforts to integrate a “new spherical payload” into the existing payload chamber of the Shahab-3 missile. The final assessment avoids mention of the technical errors in those studies, which were so significant that Sandia National Laboratories found through computer simulations that not a single one of the proposed redesign efforts would have worked. And it later became apparent that Iran had begun redesigning the entire missile system—including an entirely different reentry vehicle shape from the one shown in the drawings—well before the start date of the purported nuclear weapons work.

But the IAEA was only interested in whether the workshops portrayed in the purported intelligence were in fact workshops used by the Iranian government. Iran allowed the Agency to visit two of the workshops, and the final assessment declares that it has “verified that the workshops are those described in the alleged studies documentation” and that “the workshop’s features and capabilities are consistent with those described in the alleged studies documentation.”

Flawed Computer Modeling

One of the most egregious cover-ups in the assessment is its treatment of the alleged computer modeling of nuclear explosions. The agency recalled that it had “received information from Member States” that Iran had done modeling of “nuclear explosive configurations based on implosion technology.” Unfortunately for the credibility of that “information,” soon after that 2011 report was published someone leaked a graph of one of the alleged computer modeling efforts attributed to Iran to Associated Press reporter George Jahn. The graph was so similar to one published in a scholarly journal in January 2009 that Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said he suspected the graph had been “adapted from the open literature.”

Furthermore the information in the graph turned out to be inaccurate by four orders of magnitude. In response to that revelation, a senior IAEA official told Jahn that the Agency knew that the graph was “flawed” as soon as it had obtained it but that IAEA officials “believe it remains important as a clue to Iranian intentions.” In fact the official revealed to Jahn that the Agency had come up with a bizarre theory that Iranian scientists deliberately falsified the diagram to sell the idea to government officials of a nuclear explosion far larger than any by the United States or Russia.

That episode surely marks the apogee of the IAEA’s contorted rationalizations of the highly suspect “information” the Agency had been fed by the Israelis. In the final report, the Agency ignores that embarrassing episode and “assesses that Iran conducted computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device prior to 2004 and between 2005 and 2009,” even though it describes the modeling, enigmatically, as “incomplete and fragmentary.

The assessment further “notes some similarity between the Iranian open source publications and the studies featured in the information from Member States, in terms of textual matches, and certain dimensional and other parameters used.” Unless the Agency received the “information” from the unidentified states before the dates of the open-source publications, which one would expect to be noted if true, such similarities could be evidence of fraudulent intelligence rather than of Iranian wrong-doing. But the assessment provides no clarification of the issue.

Nuclear Material

On the issue it calls “nuclear material acquisition,” however, the Agency makes a startling retreat from its previous position that has far-reaching implications for the entire collection of intelligence documents. In its 2011 report, the IAEA had presented a one-page flow sheet showing a process for converting “yellow cake” into “green salt” (i.e., uranium that can be enriched) as a scheme to “secure a source of uranium suitable for use in an undisclosed enrichment program.”

But the final assessment explicitly rejects that conclusion, pronouncing the process design in question “technically flawed” and “of low quality in comparison with what was available to Iran as part of its declared nuclear fuel cycle.” In other words, Iran would have had no rational reason to try to seek an entirely new conversion process and then turn the project over to incompetent engineers. Those were precisely the arguments that Iran had made in 2008 to buttress its case that the documents were fabricated.

The assessment carefully avoids the obvious implication of these new findings—that the anomalies surrounding the “green salt” documents make it very likely that they have were fabricated. To acknowledge that fact would cast doubt on the entire collection. But the surprising backtracking on the “green salt’ evidence underlines just how far the IAEA has gone in the past to cover up awkward questions about the intelligence at the center of the case.

Now that the Obama administration has settled on a nuclear agreement with Iran, the IAEA will no longer have to find contorted language to discuss Iran’s past and present nuclear program. Nevertheless, the Agency remains a highly political actor, and its role in monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the agreement may bring more occasions for official assessments that reflect the political interest of the U.S.-led dominant coalition in the IAEA board of governors rather than the objective reality of the issue under review.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Counter punch,

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The MKO has on many occasions asked the US administration to provide the group with financial support in a bid to make Iraq insecure, said a report carried by Fars News Agency on Sunday.

The report added that the proposals have been put forward to US officials through former and retired Washington officials who are now among the MKO advocates, including former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, former presidential candidate John McCain and former US attorney general Michael Mukasey.

The MKO has claimed that it can recruit extremist and terrorist groups in Iraq due to its three-decade-long stay in that country which has also provided them with some in-depth knowledge of the Arab country, and then organize bombing plots, suicide attacks and spark sectarian and ethnic conflict in a bid to make the Iraqi atmosphere tense similar to the present conditions in Syria.

Earlier, a prominent Iraqi strategy analyst said that targeting the political trend in Iraq is actually a part of the broader plot against the region which is known as the Greater Middle-East plan and aimed to pressure the countries which are in the resistance front against Israel and the US.

Ahmad Al-Sharifi told Fars News Agency in January that the recent rallies in different cities of Iraq are also a part of the plot to pressure the Iraqi government to give up its independent and progressive political performance.

Iran Daily

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Iraq’s fugitive vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, for whom an arrest warrant was issued on December 19, 2011 on the charge of ordering assassinations of government officials, is one of the politicians that cooperated with the MKO, according to the interpreter, Ali Hosseininejad.

Hosseininejad, who has recently left the MKO group, said that he knows many media outlets, such as Azzaman daily newspaper, which received large sums of money from the terrorist group.

A number of the members of the Iraqi National Movement (INM), aka the al-Iraqiya List, have also cooperated with the group.

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“Intelligence reports drawn by the security committee in Diyala prove that MKO hands are involved in a series of deadly terror attacks and explosions in the province,” Fars news agency cited Abdul Nasser al-Mahdawi as telling AK News on Tuesday.

Mahdawi added that the terrorist organization has managed to train elements of other extremist groups and help them sneak into Diyala province to engage in terror activities.

The Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization was founded in Iran in the 1960s, but its top leadership and members fled the country in the 1980s after carrying out a series of assassinations and bombings inside the country.

The terrorist group is behind the killings of thousands of Iranian civilians and officials over the past 30 years. One of their deadliest attacks was a 1981 bombing that killed Iranian Judiciary chief Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, along with 71 other senior officials.

In 1999, MKO assassinated the chief-of-staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Ali Sayad Shirazi, in front of his house in the early hours of April 10, as he was preparing to leave for work.

MKO is notorious for the cult like tactics it uses to keep its members in line — namely murder and torture of its defectors.

Numerous articles and letters posted on the Internet by family members of MKO recruits confirm reports of the horrific abuse that the group inflicts on its own members and its reliance on dubious methods to lure new members into its fold.

The MKO is also known to have cooperated with Iraq’s executed dictator Saddam Hussein in a cruel suppressing of a 1991 uprising in southern Iraq and the massacre of Iraqi Kurds.

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The peaceful demonstrations and debates and insistence on achieving demands is clearly on going and while no one doubts that this political struggle will continue even after the Friday prayers led by Ayatollah Khamenei, it is now clear that the advocates of violence and so called revolution or ‘regime change’ have been left out in the cold. The more that time passes the more it becomes clear that this is no "regime change" or for that matter a pro-west or pro-east velvet revolution.

I have always believed that the theory of ‘democracy without democrats’ would emerge as the major factor in the Middle Eastern path to democracy. I believe that democracy will not emerge through democrats lecturing those in power to accept the benefits of democracy. Rather it is the people who are in power who will fight each other to the point that they clearly see that their insistence on the policy of ‘winner takes all’ will not only fail to deliver them ‘everything’, rather it is going to leave both sides with ‘nothing’. I believe this is the point that both sides come to understand that compromise and sharing in order to have something is a better option than losing everything.

At this point of course indigenous democrats can have a role as guides and experts to analyse and explain the ways forward, even though they themselves are probably still experimenting and maturing in this transitional period. There are a few historical examples to back this theory. For example, certain periods in Algerian, Turkish and even Sudan’s history where treaties have been achieved to give ‘something’ to each side instead of the ongoing bloodshed and power struggles over ‘everything. Treaties and power sharing of course by no means derive from a belief in democracy; rather they are the starting point toward understanding the benefits of democracy for all parties.

I have been watching with interest as the tone of media reports have changed from describing a ‘coup d’etat’ and the expectation of violence, to describing the gatherings of demonstrators as "pro-government" and "opposition". Yesterday the BBC, Aljazeera and many other outlets consciously or unconsciously referred to Ahmadi Nejad as "the president" and Mirhossein Mousavi as "the head of the opposition".

That reminded of my history books and the long ago days that Tories and Liberals in Britain were representing the very different interests of very different sectors of British society. From there emerged the left side and the right side of Parliament with political parties sitting on each side. The unwritten constitution of the British establishment accepted the voting system, the way the government was to be elected and the way the opposition and the government would "struggle" to represent the interests of their constituents.

Looking at the current prominent political figures in Iran on each side I can’t help envisaging the emergence of political parties in Iran (there are no actual political parties at this moment of time in Iran even though some groups may call themselves ‘parties’).

I also believe that even if Mirhossein Mosavi would have been the name coming out of the ballot boxes (I neither endorse nor reject the possibility of vote rigging but I certainly believe that both sides have enough support and constituencies to be heard), the recent demonstrations and political struggles in Tehran and other Iranian cities would have been inevitable.
It is no longer about "who takes everything". This time it is about "rejection of the theory of winner takes all". I have heard this too many times that the political struggle in western countries is over representative seats in parliament but the same struggle in the Middle East is over the necks and heads of candidates. I see clearly that Iran is emerging one step (and a very big step) closer towards a more pluralistic political system in which various politicians will be fighting over seats rather than each others’ necks. More importantly, the winners and the losers of every period will have to accept the rights of their opponents not because they are lover of democracy but rather because they have matured to see they have no other choice.

Irrelevant of the short term results of the power struggle during the next few weeks, there is no doubt about the big leap the Iranian nation has taken in her journey toward a real democracy. A big leap for the people of Iran and an irreversible huge falling backwards for the advocates of ‘regime change’ by foreign interventionist forces and supporters of terrorist groups like Mojahedin Khalq Organistion (aka: Rajavi cult; which lost it’s backer Saddam Hussein in 2003), Jondollah (the group affiliated to mass murderer Abdolmalek Rigi who is based in Pakistan) and Pejak (the Turkish PKK paid to relocate to the Iranian border for carrying out sabotage).

This weekend the Mojahedin Khalq cancelled its planned event in Paris. Instead, the cult is recruiting people through false associations and groups in order to take advantage of the current unrest in Iran. The idea is to bring Maryam Rajavi to Brussels to jump on the bandwagon of unrest. Anyone who knows anything about Iran will recognise this as an attempt by advocates of regime change to destroy the progress of democracy in Iran. These people will deploy terrorists to undermine the real opposition and democracy movement inside Iran.

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