Iranian Alert -- August 16, 2004 [EST]-- IRAN LIVE THREAD -- "Americans for Regime Change in Iran"

The US media still largely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” Most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. I began these daily threads June 10th 2003. On that date Iranians once again began taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Today in Iran, most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

Iranian Economic Reform Falters

August 16, 2004
BBC News
BBCi

The Iranian parliament on Sunday voted against key parts of a reform plan aimed at opening up the economy to foreign investment. The rejected proposals would have given oil exploration companies the right to exploit their discoveries.

They would also have paved the way for the sale of state-run banks, and allowed foreign banks to open in Iran.

The vote marks a setback for Iran's reformists, who lost control of the parliament in February.

Oil economy

The rejected measures formed a central plank of an ambitious five-year reform plan aimed at stimulating Iran's battered economy by privatising some state-owned companies, and attracting more foreign investment.

Analysts say that without foreign money, Iran is unlikely to achieve its objective of doubling its oil output to 8 million barrels a day by 2020.

Foreign oil firms had welcomed the proposal to give exploration companies the automatic right to exploit reserves they discover.

At present, successful exploration companies must enter a state-run tender to develop their discoveries, with no guarantee of success.

The failure of the proposed overhaul of the banking sector looks set to scupper tentative plans by some western banks to set up shop in Iran.

Standard Chartered and HSBC are among big-name banks thought to have expressed an interest in opening branches in Tehran.

Foreign influence

Mohammad Mir-Mohammadi, a conservative member of parliament, said the vote had prevented "foreign dominance over Iran's economy".

Iran is under pressure to maintain high rates of economic growth so as to provide employment for its large and fast-growing workforce.

High oil prices have fuelled strong expansion in recent years, but economists say the country urgently needs to reduce its dependence on oil.

The Iranian economy is dominated by the state and its infrastructure, battered by the Iran-Iraq war and starved of investment as a result of US-imposed economic sanctions, is in urgent need of upgrading.

Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, has championed efforts to modernise the economy and attract foreign investment since taking office in 1997.

But in February, his followers in parliament lost their majority to conservative hardliners after voters became disillusioned with a lack of economic progress.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3568712.stm

The Terror Masters Revisited
Let’s go to the videotape.

August 16, 2004, 8:34 a.m.
National Review Online

Saturday's Washington Post had an article that quotes the usual unnamed intelligence sources saying that they are surprised to discover that al Qaeda has "reconstitute[d]" itself. This surprise derives from, inter alia, the computer data found recently in Pakistan, intelligence sources (both ours and friends'), and simply looking at the range of activities in which the terrorists engage.

This surprise is, as usual, unsettling, since it has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since we went into Afghanistan. The cooperation increased in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was only possible because the regimes who gave the bulk of the operational support to the terrorists — Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia — worked closely to coordinate the anti-American jihad. That coordination has, for the most part, continued (note the visit of Bashar Assad to Tehran at the time of the turnover of "sovereignty" in Iraq. At those meetings, Syria and Iran agreed on a five-point plan to attack us in Iraq, Europe, and at home, and to do everything possible — including massive efforts to get the price of oil as high as they can — to defeat President Bush in November's elections).

This helps understand the coordination between, say, attacks by the forces of Moqtada al Sadr and Baathist "loyalists." The infrastructure was created before we ever arrived in Iraq.

I wrote about this phenomenon at the time, and it enabled me to accurately forecast what happened in Iraq: the active cooperation among terrorists of widely diverse ideological, religious, and national backgrounds and convictions, in a desperate effort to drive us out of Iraq.

The war in the Middle East — for it is a regional war, not merely a battle for Iraq — cannot be analyzed at the level of the individual terrorist groups, because the terrorists are part of a larger context. The organizing center is, as Spanish Magistrate Balthazar Garzon publicly put it, a "directorate" located in Iran, that works closely with Iranian intelligence organizations, including the Revolutinary Guards. Those organizations, in turn, work with their counterparts in other friendly countries.

BLIND ANALYSTS
In order to conceal their activities from us, the Iranians have deployed several deceptive myths. The two most effective are "al Qaeda" and "Zarqawi." I believe I was the first American writer to call attention to Zarqawi (long before he was named by secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council). I was able to do that because I had read German and Italian court documents that proved Zarqawi, operating from Tehran, had organized a European terrorist network. I'm sure that fact was known to Garzon, as it was to the Italian military intelligence organization, SISMI, which came to similar conclusions (published a few months ago in the Corriere della Sera).

This was the period when, according to our intelligence analysts, Zarqawi became a major player in al Qaeda.

It follows that the Iranians were involved in the marriage between al Qaeda and Zarqawi. To believe otherwise, you'd have to believe that Zarqawi and top al Qaeda officials were operating freely and independently of the Iranian regime. I don't think any serious person would buy that one.

But the notion that radical Sunni terrorists like Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri were working hand in glove with the radical Shiite regime in Tehran was an impossible hypothesis for most of our analysts, who believed that strategic cooperation between Sunnis and Shiites was not possible (even though, for example, the Sunnis of Arafat's Fatah-trained Khomeni's Shiites — the embryonic Revolutionary Guards — in the Bekaa Valley as early as 1972. I have personally interviewed the person who organized that training program). Those analysts were working with false assumptions within the wrong context.

By now, an Iranian role is obvious, as is the Syrian component. More evidence pours in every hour. Just look at the best Iraqi bloggers, or, if that's too hard, just listen to the Iraqi defense minister or the Iraqi interior minister. But I don't think we have accepted the full context, and we won't get it right so long as we continue to obsess over al Qaeda and/or Zarqawi.

Zarqawi is an instrument of a far more powerful terrorist engine: the Iranian regime, allied with other terror masters. Zarqawi himself is only involved in a fraction of the actions for which he gets credit; the most important figure is actually our old enemy, Imad Mughniya, the operational commander of Hezbollah. And if you're in a betting mood, I'll give you even money that Hezbollah is the operational glue that binds together the various terrorist factions on the ground in Iraq.

TYRANNICAL TERROR TRIO
I think it's fair to say that my analysis has stood up pretty well, starting more than a year before Operation Iraqi Freedom. If I am right, then we cannot possibly "win" in Iraq, because Iraq is just one battlefield in a (at a mininum) regional war. The Iranians, Syrians, and (a significant group of) Saudis dare not acquiesce in the creation of a free and successful Iraq, because that would mortally threaten their own survival. The regimes in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh are extremely unpopular; their peoples are aching for the chance to remove the regimes and experiment with freedom. The regimes know that, and are ruthlessly oppressing their peoples.

Remember that Machiavelli said that tyranny is most unstable form of government. And precisely because the regimes are unstable, our most potent weapon against them is political, not military. I do not believe we can win the war by force of arms alone. It is certainly very important to defeat al Sadr in Najaf and Kut, and to liberate Fallujah, but even those victories will not suffice. Our regional enemies will find new instruments — indeed, I have no doubt they have them already in place. Victory, as the president has said, requires regime change and the spread of freedom. And this is not nearly so daunting as might appear.

We defeated the Soviet Empire at a time when only a small minority of the people was willing to fight for freedom. We overthrew Milosevic with a minority of the Yugoslavs. In Iran we have upwards of 70 percent of the people on our side. If we supported them, I think it quite likely that we could liberate Iran in a matter of a few months. And if Iran falls, Syria will most likely come right alongside.

If we do not quickly expose the vulnerability of mullahs and empower the Iranian people, I believe the next few months in Iraq will, if Tehran has its way, be bloodier than anything we have seen to date. Not to mention the planned attacks against us here at home.

Faster. Please?

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen is Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200408160834.asp

REGION: Kidnappers Echo Iraqi Defense Minister’s Positions on Iran, Says Former Diplomat

RadioFarda

August 15, 2004 - In demanding the release of 500 Iraqi prisoners of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war in exchange for abducted Iranian consul in Karbala Fereydoun Jahani, the kidnappers echo the positions expressed in the past few weeks by Iraqi defense minister Hazim al-Shaalan, according to former diplomat Davood Hermidas-Bavand, who teaches international relations at the University of Tehran. “There are no POWs in Iran. This has been confirmed by the International Red Cross and by the Saddam Hussein government. The 500 whose release have been demanded are probably the POWs who joined the armed forces of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI), who returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein,” Bavand tells Radio Farda’s broadcaster Siavash Ardalan.

“There demand, which has no basis, only heightens the position taken against Iran by some in the new Iraqi government, positions which are reminders of the rhetoric of the Saddam regime,” he adds.

“There may not be any systemic relations between the kidnappers and the defense minister, but both are reviving an old view,” he says.

“The kidnapping only confirms that when a society becomes insecure, it becomes insecure for everyone, not just for certain groups,” he adds.

“An anti-Islamic Republic movement is rising in Iraq, which may only result in marginalizing Iraqi Shiites, and prevent them from gaining the upper hand which they logically deserve in a democratically elected system of government, he says.

Iraq’s neighbors may be indirectly behind the kidnapping of the man, because none of Iraq’s neighbors, including Syria and Saudi Arabia, want Iran to have a dominant influence in Iraq, Bavand says.

The US has somehow linked the radical Shiite movement in Iraq to the Islamic government, and for that reason, the forces active in Iraq have taken a relatively confrontational position towards Iran, Bavand adds.

http://www.radiofarda.com/en_news/2004/8/15/255af32d-fe8d-48a1-b972-45026a34f8cf.html#255af32d-fe8d-48a1-b972-45026a34f8cf

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