via al Shabaka

Whenever Middle East tensions rise, observers wonder whether the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt will weather the storm. It is no different this time. Asked at last Friday’s daily briefing if the peace treaty was “in jeopardy”, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, assured correspondents that the [...]]]> By Nadia Hijab

via al Shabaka

Whenever Middle East tensions rise, observers wonder whether the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt will weather the storm. It is no different this time. Asked at last Friday’s daily briefing if the peace treaty was “in jeopardy”, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, assured correspondents that the U.S. had no indications from Egypt there was “any difficulty on that question” and believed it “very important for Egypt to live up to its international obligations.”

The newly invigorated Egyptian street would beg to differ with Ms. Nuland. True, the last thing Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi needs is a definitive break with Israel or – more importantly – its U.S. patron. But he may find it hard to sustain even a cold peace in the face of the already great devastation and bloodshed Israel has visited upon the besieged Gaza Strip, whose deliberately impoverished Palestinian population has nowhere to run from the bombing and was only just beginning to recover from Israel’s 2008-9 assault.

Israel’s decision to launch a full-scale military operation that risked spiraling out of control will have fallout not just on the battlefield but also in the political arena, putting at risk its two greatest geopolitical gains of the past 30 years – the Camp David Accords with Egypt and the Oslo Accords signed with the Palestinians.

The value of these accords to Israel has been immeasurable. With Egypt definitively out of the Arab-Israeli military equation, Israel has been able to dominate the Middle East without fearing all-out war on multiple fronts.

And with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA) domesticated, Israel has been able to aggressively colonize the occupied territory with minimal obstruction, while the PA security forces – financed by the United States and European Union – play a lead role in ensuring the security of Israel’s occupation. Israel was also able to nurture new relationships in the Arab world, particularly in the Gulf.

Israel presumably factored the risks of undermining these accords into its calculations. It excels at scanning the political environment, and recalibrating its strategies accordingly, even if its policies often backfire over the longer term. Yet in the changing regional context of 2012, Israel would be foolish to presume that it alone is in a position to capitalize on opportunities produced by such dynamics.

Palestinian and Egyptian activists have for months been demanding a break with Camp David and Oslo, and similar voices are heard in Jordan regarding the Wadi Araba agreement. The Israeli offensive against Gaza gives them an opening to push further, while making it harder for the rulers of these three nations to resist calls for a clean break.

That is not to say that such activists necessarily want war with Israel. They simply want to terminate agreements that have brought neither peace nor justice, and that have tied their nations’ hands politically as well as economically. Think, for example, of the deal that obliged Egypt to sell gas at cut-rate prices to Israel. Or the Paris Protocol that gave Israel the right to collect Palestinian tax revenues and then hand them over, or not, at will. Or the Jordanian market compelled to open its doors to Israeli produce while Jordanian farmers’ products spoil.

The Egyptian response has been quick and visible. Morsi recalled his ambassador to Israel and sent his prime minister to visit Gaza. He was spared having to expel Israel’s ambassador by the fact that the latter quietly fled before Israel’s commenced its assault. Egypt worked intensely to secure a ceasefire, even though Israel assassinated its main Hamas interlocutor, Ahmad Ja’abari, after a two-day Egyptian-mediated truce that was respected – in part due to Ja’abari’s efforts – by all Palestinian factions. The inevitable Hamas response provided the pretext for Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense.

The PA/PLO response has been less visible than that of Egypt, but perhaps more dramatic when compared to its stance during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 – January 2009. At that time, the PA/PLO resisted attempts to bring about an immediate ceasefire largely to please the U.S. It still had hopes that the U.S. support would give Palestinians a fair two-state solution. It also hoped that Israel might terminally defeat Hamas and that Fatah could regain control of the Gaza Strip – lost to Hamas in June 2007.

The PA/PLO’s foot-dragging during Operation Cast Lead was so pronounced that the then-president of the UN General Assembly, the Nicaraguan priest Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, effectively accused it of complicity in damning words: “I wanted to help Palestine, but those who should supposedly have been most interested denied their support for reasons of ‘caution’ that I was incapable of understanding. I hope that they were right and that I was wrong. Otherwise, we face an ugly situation of constant complicity with the aggression against the rights of the noble and long-suffering Palestinian people.”

By contrast, during the latest assault PA/PLO head Mahmoud Abbas loudly urged Arab and international action to bring about an end to the fighting and spoke of reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. True to form, the PA/PLO security forces began by brutally cracking down on some of the West Bank demonstrations protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza, particularly those that looked as though they might reach nearby Israeli forces. But they were forced to change their tactics as the conflict escalated and demonstrators repeatedly clashed with Israeli soldiers.

Moreover, as the conflict raged the PA/PLO had to live with a major demonstration in Ramallah largely made up of Hamas forces, whose green flags dominated the event. And neither Palestinian nor Israeli forces were able to stop determined Palestinian activists from getting into the illegal Israeli West Bank settlement of Beit El despite beatings and arrests by both Israeli and Palestinian forces. Eight Palestinian women even managed to scale the settlement wall.

There is no question that Pillar of Defense has further weakened the Fatah-led PA/PLO. It has nothing to show for its participation in the U.S.-led Oslo-framed peace process that, as revealed by Al Jazeera’s Palestine Papers, reached almost slavish subservience. The aid-dependent economy that was booming in the West Bank at the time of Cast Lead is now practically on life support.

Abbas and Fatah still have control of the PLO, which is internationally recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people – and, of course, they still have those well-armed security forces. Abbas’ bid for non-member observer state at the United Nations on November 29 will help keep him and his allies in the picture, but the weaker they get, the harder it will be for them to hold the line in defense of the Oslo Accords, which Hamas refuses to recognize, at least explicitly.

Moreover, the PLO will soon be placed in the position of having to show the value-added of its upgraded UN status by seeking membership in the International Criminal Court so as to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, including in Gaza. This would be a major departure. Abbas’ team made no use of an important legal victory, the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which could have been used to stop other states from dealing with Israel’s settlements and put a brake on its colonization, among other things. And they deliberately undermined the Goldstone Report – the UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission findings on Cast Lead.

Meanwhile, no matter how great Palestinian losses in life, limb, and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, Hamas will emerge strengthened simply by surviving, as Hizballah did after Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, when Israel developed its Dahiya Doctrine of using disproportionate force to crush its enemies without heed to civilian casualties. Hamas has in addition won important shows of support from Arab states, some of whose envoys joined Egypt in visiting Gaza during Israel’s offensive. And, of course, it still has its own powerful security forces.

Hamas can taint its “victory” by transforming it into a partisan show of strength with Fatah, as its supporters were quick to do in the recent Ramallah demonstration. Such an attitude flies in the face of the resurgent movement to redefine the Palestinian national struggle as one that transcends factionalism in the quest for self-determination, freedom, justice and equality.

Hamas may use its stronger position vis-à-vis Fatah to push for full PLO membership, breaking Fatah’s longstanding stranglehold on the umbrella movement. Indeed, Fatah may find that the only way it can stay relevant is by bringing Hamas into the PLO fold while Fatah can still negotiate a significant share of seats in the Palestinian National Council and on the PLO Executive Committee. If Hamas joins the PLO while maintaining its refusal to recognize the Oslo Accords, that will be a further nail in Oslo’s all-but-sealed coffin.

Thus, Israel may find that it emerged from Operation Pillar of Defense with its military reputation relatively unscathed – only relatively because rockets that can hit Tel Aviv will never completely disappear and Iron Dome is not 100% secure – but with its ability to manage its neighborhood seriously weakened. Without a PA/PLO to mediate its West Bank occupation, Israel will have to manage it directly. Israel may also find its hitherto unfettered colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) severely constrained by determined Palestinian activism – an own goal for Benjamin Netanyahu who made settlement building a priority of his current premiership.

This is how, by pursuing military victory at any cost in the short term, Israel sets itself up for political failure in the longer-term. Its options are bleak: to maintain the present apartheid system of rule over the OPT and within Israel itself, while “thinning out” the Palestinian population to the extent possible.

In so doing, Israel faces growing world opprobrium and isolation in the Arab and Middle East regions – an Arab League meetingon Gaza called for “a moratorium” on normalization with Israel. It also faces possible PLO-led legal action against its occupation policies, continuing demonstrations and instability in the OPT and Israel, an increasingly effective campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions that is exacting a moral and economic price, and, potentially, a movement for full civil and political rights in the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 as well as the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967. These are the openings Palestinians will be using to scale up the fight for their rights.

The escalating sanctions regime that has been imposed on Iran by the United States and European Union has placed all parties involved in a rather strange position. On the US side, the palpable glee over the dropping value of the Iranian currency and the success sanctions have had in causing misery [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The escalating sanctions regime that has been imposed on Iran by the United States and European Union has placed all parties involved in a rather strange position. On the US side, the palpable glee over the dropping value of the Iranian currency and the success sanctions have had in causing misery has been hard to hide. It is also politically astute for domestic electoral purposes to take credit for the success of sanctions. That is why State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland simply couldn’t resist giving quite a bit of credit to the sanctions regime in the immediate aftermath of the currency devaluation in Iran:

Our understanding is that the Iranian currency has dropped to a historic low today against the dollar in informal currency trading, this despite some frantic efforts by the Iranian government last week to try to prop it up, rearrange the way it dealt with these issues…..From our perspective, this speaks to the unrelenting and increasingly successful international pressure that we are all bringing to bear on the Iranian economy. It is under incredible strain. Iran is increasingly cut off from the global financial system.

Yet it is not particularly seemly or civilized to take too much credit for causing misery in front of a global audience. That’s why Obama Administration officials twist and turn to explain that while sanctions are the mark of the administration’s great success, it is the Iranian government that is responsible for the deteriorating state of Iran’s economy. In the words of White House spokesman Jay Carney:

Iran’s leaders have made conscious choices about how they manage their economy, how they prioritize their budget and how they respond to the concerns of their people.  The regime has chosen to spend money to pursue nuclear activities in violation of its international obligations, to support Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime, to enable terrorist acts around the world, and to undertake destabilizing activities around the region.

The chosen examples of mismanagement is telling. Somehow we are expected to believe that the Iranian economy is in significantly worse shape than it was, let’s say, two years ago because of military and nuclear-related spending which I doubt constitutes even 1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. (The latest figure that the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research has for Iran’s total military spending as a percentage of Gross National Product is 2 percent for 2008 while the CIA fact book puts the 2006 percentage at 2.5 percent. That’s a significantly lower percentage than neighboring countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and of course the United States, which, given its vast military presence in the region, is effectively Iran’s neighbor).

But US government officials are not the only ones caught in a delicate situation regarding the impact of sanctions, trying as they are to balance their jovial sense of success for the imposed policy of collective punishment and their avowed care for the “freedom loving people” of Iran. The EU foreign ministers’ statement on the latest sanctions slaps more broad punishment against the whole country while attempting to protect its writers from a guilty conscious. They want the world to remember that the innocuously worded “restrictive measures” are not aimed at the Iranian people but only “at affecting Iran’s nuclear program and revenues of the Iranian regime used to fund the program.”

The conversation regarding the impact of sanctions is as surreal and even more politicized inside Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after years of describing sanctions as worthless pieces of torn paper but also a source of native talents’ great advancement, has suddenly found vested interest in identifying sanctions as the source of all the country’s economic woes.

It is not his fault and if you don’t believe him he is now more than willing to hand in his resignation letter, he tells a somewhat stunned audience of Iranian politicos, in a press conference last week. Just like that, with a shrug and annoying smirk, presumably assured that none of his political opponents has the energy to get too riled up about the wreckage he has made of the Iranian political and economic landscape.

Still, his conservative opponents do try to score a point by arguing otherwise. Iran’s presidential election is coming up in June 2013 and no one can afford to be associated with the policies of the past few years. These conservative opponents do not deny the impact of sanctions but see the source of the problem in Ahmadinejad’s populist and expansionary economic policies in the face of a tightening sanctions regime that he refused to take seriously and is now unable to address adequately because of the incompetence of his economic team. Their own complicity in the creation of this wreckage is of course a topic to be ignored.

Standing on top of this cantankerous conversation is Leader Ali Khamenei whose attempt to walk a tightrope in a series of speeches to various audiences in the North Khorasan Province last week was truly a spectacle. On one hand, he has been careful not to blame the sanctions too much. He is, after all, Iran’s “decider” and the person in charge of the “general direction of the country.” All along his talking point has been that Iran’s defying stance against external bullying is actually good for the country’s blossoming talent. Iran’s “resistant economy” is his brainchild.

In North Khorasan, Khamenei again reiterated his view that the sanctions regime is not about Iran’s nuclear program and is about Iran giving in to the dictates of US hegemony. The US “does not want Iran to come back to the negotiating table; it wants Iran to surrender to Western bullying during negotiation,” he said. Rightly or wrongly, it is this rather dark view of US intentions that prevents Khamenei from blaming sanctions. Iran’s defiant posture relies on the denial of the severe impact of the sanctions regime.

But Khamenei cannot go too far in blaming government policies and general incompetence for Iran’s current economic woes either. His continued support for the Ahmadinejad government is the only thing left between the latter and a testy and worried conservative political class ready to impeach the president for incompetence along with, as I mentioned above, the hope of ridding itself of the charge of complicity in bringing about Iran’s current economic problems.

In the mind of the influential conservative MP, Ahmad Tavakoli, “Ahamdinejad’s period is over and the continuation of his presidency is not positive” but a “consensus” regarding this issue has not yet developed. When asked whether this is due to the fact that some people — read Khamenei –  would like to keep the country calm in the 9 months that are left in Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Tavakoli answers in the affirmative and emphatically rejects rumors that Khamenei’s circumspection is because “Ahmadinejad and his team has threatened the Leadership.” He says that it can be accepted that at this time “tranquility is a value and losing it is considered a loss of value but the conclusion will not always be this.” In fact, Tavakoli goes on to make clear that he disagrees with Khamenei’s decision to tolerate Ahmadinejad until the end of his term for the sake of political tranquility.

There are others who seem to agree. Last week, over 100 MPs once again signed on to a question from the president regarding the currency situation. If Khamenei doesn’t put a stop to this process – and he probably will – Ahmadinejad will be hauled to the Parliament for a second time this year. Given the rule changes put in place after his last showing, if the Parliament is not satisfied with his answer, a vote will have to be taken regarding whether to lodge a complaint against him in the Judiciary.

The likelihood of this happening is low but I guess it is important to note that even if the Iranian economy is imploding and on the verge of collapse as some western officials claim, the politics of bickering continues to rule supreme even in Iran and is bound to get worse with the nearing of the election season despite Khamanei’s repeated calls for calm and not treating competitors as enemies.

The US and EU are touting Iran’s currency woes as proof that sanctions are working, though it’s not clear to what end. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Western powers “are working on new coordinated measures intended to accelerate the recent plunge of Iran’s currency and drain its foreign-exchange reserves”:

The first [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The US and EU are touting Iran’s currency woes as proof that sanctions are working, though it’s not clear to what end. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Western powers “are working on new coordinated measures intended to accelerate the recent plunge of Iran’s currency and drain its foreign-exchange reserves”:

The first salvos in this stepped-up sanctions campaign are expected at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Oct. 15, including a ban on Iranian natural-gas exports and tighter restrictions on transactions with Tehran’s central bank, European officials said.

The U.S. and EU are also considering imposing a de facto trade embargo early next year by moving to block all export and import transactions through Iran’s banking system ….

To that end, U.S. lawmakers are drafting legislation that would require the White House to block all international dealings with Iran’s central bank, while also seeking to enforce a ban on all outside insuring of Iranian companies.

David Cohen, who coordinates the US’s Iran sanctions policy from within the Treasury, outlined the US’s stance in a speech before a British think tank. Reuters reports:

[David] Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, added in remarks on a visit to Britain’s Chatham House think-tank that Iran had the ability to “relieve the pressure its people are feeling” by resolving concerns over its nuclear work.

“What in particular has sparked the most recent precipitous decline in the rial, I’m not in a position to say on a granular basis,” he said, adding however that over the past year it had fallen substantially.

The Washington Post also reported that EU officials are “even more blunt” over the intentions behind the sanctions:

One senior European official said the goal of the tightened sanctions was to “bring the Iranian economy to its knees,” and to “make it in a way that really hurts the regime more than the population. That is very difficult.”

But US officials are also attempting to downplay the negative effects of the sanctions by blaming the regime. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said yesterday that “[t]he Iranian state has horribly mismanaged all aspects of their internal situation.” Cohen told the Chatham House audience that the unrest in Iran “is undoubtedly in significant part due to the Iranian government’s own mismanagement of its economy and it is in part due to the effect of sanctions. The Iranian leadership has within its capacity the ability to relieve the pressure its people are feeling.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered the following qualifier:

“They have made their own government decisions– having nothing to do with the sanctions– that have had an impact on the economic conditions inside of the country,”" Mrs. Clinton said. “Of course, the sanctions have had an impact as well, but those could be remedied in short order if the Iranian government were willing to work with. . .the international community in a sincere manner.”

By Wayne White

It is probably inaccurate to take the State Department to task in isolation as having made the decision to delist the Mujahadeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. State is the cabinet department that must officially announce (or take formal action related to the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

By Wayne White

It is probably inaccurate to take the State Department to task in isolation as having made the decision to delist the Mujahadeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. State is the cabinet department that must officially announce (or take formal action related to the US court challenge), but that does not mean the State Department did in fact make this decision on its own. In fact, with a history of being a sort of weak sister in foreign policy decisions with some consistency since the Kennedy Administration (and at least two administrations prior to that in the 20th Century), most foreign policy decisions of any importance have been made by the White House, with other key players like the National Security Council, in some instances the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, as well as influential members of Congress often carrying more weight than — or at least as much as — State when all is said and done.

Under Hillary Clinton, the State Department surely has become a more important player than it was, say, when Colin Powell was so consistently bypassed or ignored under the first George W. Bush Administration. Still, the Administration (comprising a foreign policy team on which State frequently is but one voice) makes the final call on most important decisions, regardless of what bureaucratic mouthpiece must pronounce the result. So, it is often the White House where the proverbial buck stops. Indeed, burnt into my memory are plenty of times when I was in State/INR and the Department was being hammered by the media and various informed observers for making an unfortunate decision, when all around me — often all the way up to the Secretary’s suite on the 7th Floor — officials at State were seething over how their opinion to the contrary had been ignored by this or that Administration.

Second, this decision comes in the context of an especially hotly contested US presidential election campaign (often called by insiders — and for good reason in many instances — the foreign policy “silly season” because of statements and decisions that might have gone differently had campaign pressures been absent). Making decisions that appear in any way favorable to the Iranian regime are a hard sell in a political Washington flush with various powerful constituencies favorable to Israel or hostile to a regime perceived widely as aligned against the US and various US interests. But entering the last & most critical 6-7 weeks of the presidential election campaign (and the ongoing & controversial Iran/Nuclear standoff), there doubtless were some within the Administration worried about the potential adverse political blowback of sustaining the MEK listing. This blowback could include accusations from the Romney camp that the US was being “soft on Iran”, that the White House was allegedly “weak” in standing up to “terrorist threats” overall (in this case, the regime in Iran), and that it was blocking efforts by an anti-regime Iranian group.

I opposed this decision because of what I know about the MEK.  Nonetheless, I also can imagine how campaign-focused Administration officials might have imagined something like this being raised by Gov. Mitt Romney in next week’s presidential debate, knowing that in a time-compressed debate the President would have been hard put to argue the merits of the case once he had been accused of holding back what could be characterized by his opponents as a group opposed to Iran’s clerical regime — one that had supposedly gathered “valuable” intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. Most American voters haven’t a clue as to what the MEK is, let alone its many unsavory and violent activities (as well as its bizarre internal dynamics), and all they would pick up on are loaded phrases like “anti-regime Iranian group,” “soft on Iran” and so on.

Mind you, I am not making excuses for the Obama Administration concerning this decision, but let us also not neglect the pressures from other quarters — many of them hostile to the Administration politically — that might well have figured into a decision that almost certainly was to some degree “political” and not determined solely on the merits of the case.

- Wayne White is a Policy Expert with Washington’s Middle East Policy Council. He was formerly the Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (INR/NESA) and senior regional analyst. Access Mr. White’s Lobe Log article archive here. 

By Leila Kashefi

As everyone knows, since the revolution of 1979, the United States and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) have been BEFs — best enemies forever. While the US occasionally offers its solidarity to the people of Iran and criticizes the regime’s human rights record, its [...]]]> via Lobe Log

By Leila Kashefi

As everyone knows, since the revolution of 1979, the United States and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) have been BEFs — best enemies forever. While the US occasionally offers its solidarity to the people of Iran and criticizes the regime’s human rights record, its policy of sanctions and isolation actually strengthens regime hardliners. So it’s not surprising that on some days Iranians think: with an enemy like the US, why would the IRI need any friends?

Last Friday, September 21^st, was one of those days. The State Department, under pressure from powerful but unknown powers, leaked the news that the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a shady quasi-cultish group with a history of violence and intimidation, would be delisted from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Iranians inside and outside the country rarely agree about anything. They find common ground in their love of pomegranates, pride for Iranian athletes competing internationally, respect for Mohammad Mossadeq, the 1950s prime minister who nationalized Iranian oil before being ousted in a US-backed coup, and deep contempt if not hatred for the MEK.

Those who lived through the early years of the Iranian revolution remember the MEK’s violence, which was justified somehow by their curious mix of Islam and Marxism. But the real animosity for the movement arose when they went into exile, settling and supporting Saddam Hussein in the 8-year Iran-Iraq war. As a British-educated former Iranian senior civil servant once said to me: “During World War II siding with the enemy was treason and punishable by death. The MEK committed treason, and the Iranian public will never forgive them.”

The movement was never transparent. During the past 30 years it has spun out a myriad of different organizations across Europe, with headquarters in Paris. Its leader Maryam Rajavi proclaims herself as the democratic leader of Iran, with hardly any support from Iranians inside Iran. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the MEK slid into obscurity. But as the war drums against Iran started to beat more loudly in Washington, DC, the MEK took on a new lease of life.

It has been incredible to watch members of a designated terror group walk the halls of Congressional office buildings, mingling with Hill staffers and representatives. “The only Iranians we see are the MEK,” said one staffer not long ago. Given how notoriously apolitical the Iranian-American community is, the fact that the MEK is bankrolled to such an extent should have prompted questions long ago – but somehow those who know prefer not to talk.

Anyone claiming that the MEK has broad-based support was proven wrong in 2009 in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections. I remember standing among the thousands of American-Iranians who had traveled to New York to protest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN General Assembly amidst the Green movement’s post-election protests in Iran. We were a literal sea of green spilling across the streets and avenues of New York; thousands of Iranians, young and old from across North America, joined together in our outrage towards the regime’s election theft. The MEK and the Monarchists were also there, but their numbers were puny and their presence pathetic. The MEK was nothing and nobody either inside or outside Iran. In New York that day they packed up and left rather quickly.

But in Washington their political influence continued to grow. Indeed, soon after the 2009 events, the MEK was hobnobbing with former generals and senior diplomats, buying their endorsements with money that clearly had not come from the pockets of Iranians.

Pundits and policymakers in Washington may try to minimize the significance of the State Department’s move, suggesting that the MEK is too weak to be effective and that its organization will be dismantled. But that’s not the point. In Tehran, the State Department’s deal feeds directly into the regime’s narrative: that the US is backing the MEK to launch attacks against Iran and undermine the territorial integrity of the country. MEK affiliation will likely become even more of an excuse for the persecution of students and activists.

Its ironic that after thirty years, just as the regime’s narrative of the US as the evil empire bent on destroying Iran was heading into the dustbin, it is the US itself that has given the narrative a new lease on life.

As for the people of Iran, many are beginning to wonder why the US despises them so much.  Already suffering under the regime’s boot, they are also subjected to US-led economic sanctions that are destroying the middle class while strengthening the hands of the system’s loyalists. Now comes the news that the despised MEK is free to operate outside the country and steal their voice. For the Iranian people it seems like President Obama’s inauguration promise of an outstretched hand has turned out to be a rude slap in the face.

- Leila Kashefi is a pseudo-name for the author of this article, a Washington-based Iranian-American civil rights activist.