A top foreign policy adviser to GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is highly active in a campaign on behalf of an Iranian anti-regime exile group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.
Mitchell Reiss, the president of Maryland’s Washington College who also advised [...]]]>
A top foreign policy adviser to GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is highly active in a campaign on behalf of an Iranian anti-regime exile group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.
Mitchell Reiss, the president of Maryland’s Washington College who also advised Romney in his 2007 campaign for the Republican presidential nod, has spoken at several events this year aimed at removing the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. terror list. Describing Reiss as taking a “leading role” in the campaign, Salon’s Justin Elliott reported:
In January he spoke at a conference organized by ExecutiveAction, a D.C.-based “problem solving company” that has spearheaded the campaign to delist the MEK. He also moderated a second, similar MEK event in April at the Capital Hilton in Washington and moderated yet another in July at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel.
While Reiss, who was a State Department official under George W. Bush, didn’t respond to Elliott’s inquiry about being paid for appearances, he’s shared the dais with other former officials who’ve admitted to taking money.
The pro-MEK campaign has drawn attention for the millions of dollars behind it. The Huffington Post and Christian Science Monitor recently released long and granular exposés of the shadowy networks behind the campaign and the speakers who take tens of thousands of dollars for speeches that often clock in under ten minutes.
The MEK, a group with roots in an unusual revolutionary mix of Islamic Marxism, has a support network among a small number of Iranian exiles and some of Washington’s Iran hawks, including a few liberal supporters.
Blacklisted by the U.S. in 1997 for terrorist actions undertaken since roughly its founding in the mid-1960s (including killing Americans in Iran in the 1970s), the group fought a terror war against the Shah and, after falling out of favor with the new Islamic regime of 1979, against the Islamic Republic. At the peak of their popular strength in Iran, the group went into exile first in France then in the mid-1980s to Iraq, where it both continued its struggle against Iran and periodically served as a Saddam Hussein mercenary force.
The MEK’s partnership with Saddam during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War caused its popularity among Iranians to plummet, and by almost all accounts few supporters remain inside the country. For these reasons and others, many don’t consider the group a viable Iranian democratic opposition.
Likewise, the MEK’s partnership with Saddam’s brutal regime created hostility toward the group among Iraqis. Much of the pro-MEK advocacy focuses on the 3,400 fighters that remain in an Iraqi encampment known as Camp Ashraf. Forcibly disarmed by invading U.S. troops in 2003, Iraqi security forces occasionally storm the outskirts of the camp, leading to what many critics have called a humanitarian crisis. (Human Rights Watch has also accused the MEK of abusing its members at the camp.)
But the crisis at Camp Ashraf is often conflated with the MEK’s push to get off the terror list. Iranian-American groups as well as members of Iran’s internal opposition Green Movement have advocated for keeping the group on the list because of the potential harmful effects to their efforts inside Iran.
Despite the group’s bizarre founding ideology, today it seems to adhere mostly to adoration of the groups husband-and-wife leadership Massoud and Maryam Rajavi — leading reputable journalists and think tanks to accuse the group of having cultish traits.
While the MEK renounced violence in 2001, in 2003 French police investigated the group for plotting terror attacks inside Iran and Europe. 16 people across Europe set themselves on fire when the Maryam Rajavi was arrested. No charges were ever filed.
But more recently, some pro-MEK activists in Washington hinted that the group may indeed still intend to commit violent acts inside Iran and do it at the behest of the U.S. — a possibility that would open up were the group delisted. The National Iranian American Council, and advocacy group that’s mounted an anti-delisting campaign, reported on a pro-MEK event last week in Washington:
“We need a very active tit for tat policy,” said McInerney. “So every time they kill Americans, they have an accident in Iran.”
While Elliott reports that Romney has not taken a postion on the MEK, he has used bellicose rhetoric about Iran, calling the Islamic Republic “unalloyed evil.”
In a New Republic piece on the various foreign policies of the Republican field, journalist Eli Lake noted that in Romney’s 2007 campaign for the Republican nod, Reiss served to moderate the hawkish influence of neoconservative pundit Dan Senor (who’s also back advising Romney). But with Reiss so active in a campaign the support the MEK, one shouldn’t expect him to moderate any hawkishness on Iran issues — a pro-MEK stance would even out-hawk some neoconservatives.
]]>Saying Iran remained his government’s biggest worry, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon did not mention possible unilateral military strikes [...]]]>
(Reuters) – The United States and its allies have up to three years to curb Iran’s nuclear programme, which has been set back by technical difficulties and sanctions, a senior Israeli official said on Wednesday.
Saying Iran remained his government’s biggest worry, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon did not mention possible unilateral military strikes by Israel, saying he hoped U.S.-led action against Tehran would be successful.
For as long as anyone can remember, Israel has been telling anyone who will listen (still a surprisingly large number, considering how wrong they’ve been) that Iran is around the corner from a nuclear weapons capability.
Justin Elliott was all over this ridiculousness in his excellent Salon article. And it came up at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies conference that I covered for LobeLog and Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel.
At that conference, neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake had the best question of the whole two and a half days, on this very subject:
QUESTION: Thank you. This is a question for General Amidror.
Could you comment on why it seems Israeli estimates of the Iranian program have been one to two years away for about 10 years now?
Does this reflect the failure of your analysts or the success of your saboteurs?
Amirdror, ever the diplomatic general, answered “both.”
Back to Yaalon’s latest prediction. Reuters puts Israel’s Deputy PM’s views in context:
Yaalon had previously been hawkish on Iran, saying Israel, believed to have region’s only nuclear arsenal, should attack Iran rather than see it get the bomb.
All the prognosticating makes me want to take odds. But I’m afraid Yaalon might get the wrong idea if I asked, “Who wants to take this action?”
]]>I won’t bother going over her recommendations and rebutting them, because so many have already done it for me:
Matt Duss at the Wonk Room, whose entire post is a definite must-read:
What’s Farsi for ‘Cakewalk’?
…Maybe there are Iranian democrats who support the U.S. bombing their country, I’d love to hear from them. But I think we’ve gotten far too casual about proposing these sorts of attacks. If we’re going to talk about it, let’s at least talk about it seriously, recognizing that very many people will very likely die. They deserve a lot better than than you know, if everything goes just right, it just might work!
Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists.
…The “car accident” line in her post is a clear reference to the bombing of two scientists’ cars last month in Tehran. Here is a BBC account of those attacks, carried out by unknown men on motorbikes. One of the scientists was killed and one was wounded. Both of their wives were also reportedly wounded. Another nuclear scientist was killed in a similar bombing earlier this year.
No one has argued that any of these men could be considered combatants. It’s also still unclear who was behind the attacks, though Iran has accused the United States and Israel of having a role. But even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.
At Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss picks up on this same inconsistency, but has a broader point about the Post:
The Washington Post has replaced the American Enterprise Institute as the primary hub of neoconservative arguments for U.S. aggression in the Middle East. AEI served a Republican administration, and cannot perform that role for Democrats. So the Post is now doing the job, percolating militarist ideas for the Obama administration. Old wine in a new bottle. Jennifer Rubin is the latest hire, fresh from Commentary magazine, arguing for an attack on Iran…
Later on Weiss comes back to the issue, and points us to a Huffington Post piece by David Bromwich, who calls it “barbarous dialect”:
There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why?
Bromwich focuses on President Barack Obama’s decision to assassinate a U.S. citizen who preaches violent extremism against the U.S., and the fact that even the president can joke about “drone strikes” — that is, shooting missiles down on villages from on high. Bromwich:
]]>A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.
The first is a timeline of the U.S. [...]]]>
The first is a timeline of the U.S. campaign. The latest salvo is the WikiLeaks cables, but Elliott begins in 1993 with a Washington Post piece called: “Israel seeking to convince U.S. that West is threatened by Iran.” Overall, the timeline is illuminating (although as Elliot says, “subjective”), especially in light of the recent claims by neoconservatives and their hawkish pro-Israel allies, in the wake of WikiLeaks revelations, that the campaign to attack Iran is not really about Israel. This is of course based based on the premise that a handful of Arab autocratic dictators also think it’s a good idea. Israeli figures, hawkish U.S. Jewish groups and neoconservatives pervade the list of historic items, especially in the early years of the campaign.
The second story relates to the first in that many of the figures in this two-decade campaign have been wrong, wrong, wrong about Iranian nuclear development. It’s a wonder the press still buys their analysis, given the neoconservative propensity to seek out information (and only that information) bolstering their talking points. headline of Elliott’s headline says it all: “Israel on Iran: So Wrong for So Long — The extremely long history of incorrect Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear bomb.”
Given Elliott went to the trouble of researching and putting together this timeline documenting repeated Israeli miscalculations, why not quote from him a bit:
Elliot:
According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.
None of this is to say that Iran will not at some point get a nuclear weapon — though the Iranian government has maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. That said, Iran has not fully cooperated with international inspectors. But even assuming that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, estimates still vary widely on when it will reach that goal.
So what the below timeline should show us is a few things: making accurate predictions about the future is difficult; the Israelis are almost certainly not always offering good-faith assessments of intelligence on Iran; and reporters and the public should demand evidence for assertions about an Iranian nuclear program, whomever the source.
Both timelines are well worth reviewing. You can see the campaign-for-war timeline and the timeline of Israel’s sloppy predictions at Salon.
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