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Commentary
by U.S. Alliance for Democratic Iran
Ayatollahs’ Playbook for Survival
On Monday, the same day Iran’s thug
par-excellence president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
sacked two of his key ministers; two Belgian
tourists were reported kidnapped near
quack-stricken city of Bam in southeast Iran; an
ultra-hardliner panel was appointed - with the
blessing of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of
course - to monitor the next parliamentarian
elections; and Iran's notorious judiciary
announced that it had finished its
investigations of two Iranian-Americans charged
with plotting to destabilize the regime.
That’s not all. As security forces arrested five
members of Tehran's bus drivers' union after
they visited the home of their imprisoned
leader, Mansour Ossalou., two Iranian Kurdish
journalists have been sentenced to death by the
courts. Meanwhile a new wave of executions, many
of them in public, is spreading across Iran.
Authorities in the province of Kerman announced
this week that they will hang a dozen
individuals soon.
Just another ordinary day in Iran.
Still, that's not all. When it comes to
fomenting mayhem and bloodshed, Iran rulers are
masters of multi-tasking and equal-opportunity
champions. Their busy schedule to put down
domestic dissent and erecting gallows across
Iran has not kept them fully pre-occupied. They
have plenty of time to make sure Iraqis are not
deprived of their daily dosage of bombings and
blood-letting.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker - who
at times seems struggling hard to hide his
frustration with the futility of holding
security talks with the Iranians - told
reporters last month that rather than adhering
to its pledge of cooperating on Iraq’s security,
Iran had in fact increased its destabilizing
operations inside Iraq.
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the U.S.
second-in-command in Iraq, seconded Amb.
Crocker’s assessment last week, telling
reporters that that the outlaw Shiite militia
forces, armed and trained by Iran, were
responsible for 73 percent of lethal attacks
against American forces in month of July.
General Odierno also provided a political
context for the sharp increase in Tehran’s
support for its terrorist Iraqi proxies. He said
Tehran was seeking to foment a surge in militia
action against American forces ahead of the
September report to US congress on progress in
Iraq.
Iraq’s embattled Prim Minister, Nuri Al-Maliki
is now referred to as “Iran’s Prime Minister” in
Iraq in many of Baghdad's political circles. In
fact the volume of evidence indicating the
extent of Tehran’s full penetration into key
centers of the Iraqi government and its
multi-dimensional support for its terrorist
proxies is so massive that the news about
Tehran’s continued leaps toward nuclear weapons
capability has been eclipsed by headlines
dealing with Iran’s meddling in Iraq.
Tehran’s rising crackdown of the restive
Iranians, its campaign in Iraq, and its nuclear
drive constitutes the main ingredients of the
mullahs’ strategy of survival. Without gallows
and public hangings, without TV “confession”
travesty, without kidnapping and torture of
dissidents, the tyrant mullahs would not be able
to keep their house of cards. Without a reign of
terror, they would not be able to quell the
rising opposition to their nuclear program and
financing of terrorism in Iraq using the oil
revenue while more than half of Iran’s
population lives in poverty.
Late June, just a few days after major uprisings
sparked by sudden announcement of rationing fuel
shook Iran, a major state-run daily correctly
described the mullah’s bleak prospects.
The Etemad daily newspaper acknowledged
that there are mounting economic, health,
transportation and bread and butter issues that
have turned the society into a barrel of
explosives where anything could ignite it. “It
does not matter what the event is; it could be
the loss of the national soccer team, sudden
loss of electricity, the cutting off of the
drinking water, or the sudden and unexpected
rationing of the fuel... They all can spark a
riot... Although most of these riots are put
down after the security and military agencies
intervene, every act of riot adds to the
collective memory of the people who will use it
as capital or a learned experience for the next
uprising.”
Jean Lure, the Africa-Asia Monthly’s
correspondent reported from Tehran in the
July-August issue of the magazine that “The
truth is that the mullahs are fearful that
peoples’ demands will spread throughout the
country and get out of control as they did at
the end of the Shah’s era thus bring down the
regime. The launch of writing slogans on the
walls in big cities in favor of
Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) brings back bitter
memories in mullahs’ minds.”
The article adds that “The Iranian rulers are
very concerned and alarmed. Not because of
unfeasible foreign military attack but because
of peoples’ support for Mojahedin-e-Khalq.
Today, MEK is highly capable of attracting the
young people born and raised after the
revolution.”
The turbaned tyrants have strategically extended
boundaries of the battleground of the war they
have waged against their first and foremost
enemy; the Iranian people. The battleground is
no longer confined to the streets of Iran’s
towns and cities. It has now been expanded to
the streets of Baghdad, Basra, and Beirut. The
ayatollahs’ plan to succeed in this existential
war requires their success in Iraq and in
acquiring the A-bomb. To render their wicked
playbook ineffective, they must be dealt with in
Iraq, fiercely and decisively.
Tehran’s defeat in Iraq would be a huge boost
for Iran’s movement for democratic change. If
ayatollahs fail in Baghdad, they would fall in
Tehran. (USADI)
USADI
Commentary reflects the viewpoints of the US Alliance
for Democratic Iran in respect to issues and events
which directly or indirectly impact the US policy toward
Iran |