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December 14, 2006:
Iran’s Electoral
Travesty:
Tomorrow, Iran’s ruling tyranny will hold it's theocratic
version of “elections” for the Assembly of Experts and the city
councils. Although tomorrow’s elections could be viewed as a
barometer of factional balance within the theocratic regime,
their first and foremost utility for the ruling regime is to
give it an aura of popular legitimacy at a time it is faced with
mounting dissent at home and diplomatic isolation abroad.
As far as being a display of popular sovereignty, elections are
meaningless under the mullahs’ rule. The clerical establishment
is built on the anti-democratic doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, the
absolute rule of clerics...
November 28, 2006:
Capitulation by Any Other
Name: As Iraq’s President Jalal Talebani arrived in
Tehran on Monday, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeted
him by pledging that his government “will do anything to help
bring peace into Iraq.” Imagine that: Ahmadinejad; the
peacemaker.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, a senior American
intelligence official has revealed that Tehran has coordinated
the training of up to 2,000 fighters of the Iraqi Mahdi Army and
other Shiite militias by Hezbollah. The Times added that
“American officials say the Iranians have also provided direct
support to Shiite militias in Iraq, including explosives and
trigger devices for roadside bombs, and training for several
thousand fighters, mostly in Iran. The training is carried out
by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of
Intelligence and Security, they say.” ...
October 17, 2006:
Tehran’s Iraqi Hit List:
True to his repeated pledge to make the
theocratic Iran a model for other countries in the region,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is working hard to make his
regime’s treatment of the press and free speech a model for
Iraq. The systematic closure of news publications and
imprisonment of journalists - a common practice during Mohammad
Khatami’s eight-year presidency - has only worsened since
Ahmadinejad and took office. Human rights organizations have
consistently branded Iran as one of the most dangerous countries
for journalists...
September 26, 2006:
The Confidence of a
Brute: During his week-long stay in New York, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad performed exactly as a veteran thug turned president
would. And he did a good job of being brutish himself. In that
sense, he did not at all disappoint his benefactors back in Iran
and in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp. He was offensive,
brazen, abrasive and crass in substance and tone. Wearing a
repugnant smile, he, not so implicitly, mocked his interlocutors
and persistently accused them of being the mouthpiece of
administration by asking the questions of the “others”, as if he
was being interviewed by a state-run media in Iran...
August 22, 2006:
Nothing But Shame:
Today the Washington Post reported that “the Bush administration
has agreed to issue a visa to former Iranian President Mohammad
Khatami to give a public address at the Washington National
Cathedral” early next month. Citing Khatami's “commitment to a
dialogue between civilizations and cultures,” the Rev. Samuel T.
Lloyd III, dean of the Washington National Cathedral, told the
Washington Post that, "It will be an honor for the cathedral to
provide a platform for President Khatami."...
July 29, 2006:
Mullahs’ War with
Iranians Rages on: Almost two years have past since the
barbaric public execution of Atefe Rajabi, the 16-year old
teenage Iranian girl, in northern town of Neka. Since then, with
ascendancy of the notorious and extremely suppressive Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps’ elite to all levers of power,
culminating in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency last year, the
human rights situation and suppression of dissidents have only
worsened in Iran.
Ahmadinejad is indeed the clearest declaration yet of the war
the clerical regime has waged on millions of Iranians at home,
and on the peace and security of the world, since coming to
power in 1979. Since then tens of thousands of Iranians have
been killed by firing squads and gallows or in torture dungeons
of the mullahs. The killings have not stopped...
July 10, 2006:
Iran’s 1999 Six Days of
Uprising: On July 9, 1999, six days of student-led
uprising shook the foundations of Iran’s ruling tyrannical
regime. The uprising marked a milestone in the history of
Iranians’ struggle to overthrow the mullah’s reign of terror and
establish a democratic and secular government in its place. With
the blessing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then-President
Mohammad Khatami, uniformed and plain-clothes security forces,
assisted by a multitude of intelligence agencies, brutally
cracked down on students and thousands of other Iranians who had
joined them...
June 5, 2006:
Empowering the “Outpost of
Tyranny”: In public policy statements, State of the
Union addresses, and congressional hearings, the stated policy
of the United States was said to be all about empowering the
Iranian people in their quest for liberty and democracy and
isolating the ruling tyrants. In practice, however, it appears
that the exact opposite has occurred. In the same week the
anti-government demonstrations in many Azeri provinces of Iran
and at major universities escalated, and at the time Iranians
were shouting “death to the dictator” and “down with despots”,
Washington bestows Tehran its most sought after concession by
offering to join direct negotiations with the cunning mullahs...
May
9, 2006:
Dead
on Arrival: Tehran’s advocates on both sides of
the Atlantic have been pushing hard for “direct talks” or a
"Grand Bargain" with the clerical regime. Their rigorous and
delusional campaign could undermine the administration’s
diplomatic efforts at the UN Security Council to bring pressure
on Iran to halt its nuclear weapons drive. On Monday, Iran's
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also acted to thwart the UN
debate. He sent a letter to President G. W. Bush via the Swiss
Embassy in Tehran... Ahmadinejad’s letter fully fits with
Tehran's established pattern of diplomatic games to stall for
badly needed time. It was clearly timed to complicate the start
of a new round of diplomatic efforts at the Security Council:
kudos to the administration for swiftly dismissing it...
April 21, 2006:
At Tehran’s Service:
The debate about how Washington should deal with Iran’s rogue
rising has heated up amidst reports about planning for a
military option and the "realist" policy circles' call for
"direct talks" with Tehran. The latest resurrection of the
pro-appeasement camp coincides with Tehran's announcement that
it had succeeded in enriching uranium and escalating terrorist
activities and rising number of executions and public hangings
in Iran. There is nothing new about the essence of the case made
for the direct talks. It seems, depending on who the president
is in Iran, the line of reasoning changes but the policy call
remains the same: Begin direct talks with mullahs and sweeten
the deal with "broad economic and security concessions." ...
April 14, 2006:
Tehran’s Yellow Cake Celebration: The “yellow
cake celebration” last Tuesday in Iran could not have been more
surreal and morbid . Men in a parade-like dance waved a small
silver box containing the first enriched uranium. Iran’s radical
president and former assassin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted
that Tehran was now a member of “the nuclear club” before a huge
mural of white doves and amidst chants of "God is Great”, "Death
to America", and “Down with Counter-Revolutionaries.” And with
that, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei and his hand-picked
president took another step to dare the world community...
April 5, 2006:
Terrorism Remains Tehran’s Weapon of Choice: Far
from being a show of “force”, Iran’s recent week-long third-rate
military maneuver in the Persian Gulf, and its laughable claim
to “technological advancement”, were just a display of the
clerical regime’s belligerence. Boasting about flying boats,
radar-evading torpedoes and array of funny sounding missiles,
fully fit the pattern of Tehran’s hype and exaggerated claims to
military prowess. It serves, among other things, to invigorate
the regime’s increasingly shrinking loyal base. Military experts
have disputed claims of the indigenousness and sophistication of
these technologies and their impact on the balance of power in
the Gulf...
March 24, 2006:
Desperate Clerical Measures:
In March 1990, one year into his first term as president, Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani mocked President Bush Sr. for taking a
telephone call from someone posing as Rafsanjani offering a
one-to-one talk between the two countries. “America is very much
in need of talking to Iran, and praise be to God, it is deprived
of this. Iran is so important that the biggest power in the
world, the biggest bully on earth, tries to contact its
officials by telephone,” Rafsanjani said. The hoax set up by the
clerical regime then sought to embarrass President Bush over the
issue of the “talk”. Sixteen years later, one wonders what sort
of ploy Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has up in his sleeves
with the March 2006 offer of talks with the United States....
March 16, 2006:
The Rude Awakening of Iraq:
It is very encouraging that a growing number of Iraqi
politicians, joined by US officials in Baghdad and Washington
are talking, in varying tones, about how Iran is fueling and
directing the sectarian conflict in Iraq. More encouraging,
however, is the rise and consolidation of an anti-fundamentalist
front in that country. The terrorist bombing of the sacred
shrines in Iraqi city of Samarra was indeed a rude awakening for
all those who never thought Tehran would get into the wicked
business of blowing up the Shiites’ holiest sites. Welcome to
the evil world of Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism in which
every imaginable act of barbarism is justified when it suits the
mullahs' interests...
March 9, 2006:
Iran’s Nuclear Threat: The
Next Phase: At last. It is official; Iran’s
nuclear dossier has been referred to the UN Security Council for
further action. That’s good news and a strategic step forward,
albeit long over-due. Tehran’s ‘Russian dance’ early this week
did little to decisive anyone. It grabbed lots of headlines but
at the end it was just another episode of the now-familiar
eleventh-hour ploy by the clerical regime to sow division and
buy time. Iran’s file, however, should have been referred to UN
in the fall of 2003; right after the report of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chronicled the 18-years of Tehran’s
lies and deception to cover its secret nuclear weapons program.
The 30-months delay gave Iran a golden opportunity to further
advance its nuclear program...
March 3, 2006:
Tehran Inflames Iraq’s
Sectarian Strife: Early in the week, Iran’s
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei claimed Iraq was the “embodiment” of
America’s defeat there. He also said Washington’s goals in Iraq
are the “creation of division and insecurity, and an effort to
paint the popularly-elected government of Iraq as incompetent”.
Repeating his previous accusations, Khamenei added that “the
Americans are trying to instigate a sectarian and religious war
in Iraq, and the cataclysmic event in Samarra is a case in
point.” So, was last week’s bombing aimed at a future democratic
national unity government in Iraq? Indeed, it was; with Tehran
as the main beneficiary of the attack...
February 15, 2006:
Of Mullahs, Nukes, and
Cartoons: On February 14 1989, Ayatollah
Rouhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s fundamentalist regime,
issued a fatwa against the British author Salman Rushdie. At the
time, the regime having accepted defeat in the eight-year war
with Iraq was engulfed in internal conflicts and crumbling under
domestic and international pressure. Khomeini had been forced to
"drink from the chalice of poison of the ceasefire," as he put
it, in war he had insisted was a “divine blessing,” and the
gateway to "liberating Jerusalem via Karbala”...
January 16, 2006:
Tehran’s Nuclear Rising:
In August of 2002, the then spokesperson for the National
Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Washington DC, Alireza
Jafarzadeh, ripped the lid off of Iran’s 18 year old clandestine
nuclear weapons program. That revelation included the locations
of two nuclear facilities in Arak and Natanz. Prior to that
revelation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had no
knowledge either facility existed. Because the Iranian regime
did not voluntarily provide the locations or purpose of these
facilities, IAEA inspectors had no mandate to inspect or verify
the sites at Arak and Natanz were intended for peaceful nuclear
energy production or the production of nuclear war heads...
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The US Alliance for Democratic Iran (USADI), is a
US-based, non-profit, independent organization, which promotes
informed policy debate, exchange of ideas, analysis, research and
education to advance a US policy on Iran which will benefit America’s
interests, both at home and in the Middle East, through supporting Iranian
people’s aspirations for a democratic, secular, and
peaceful government, free of tyranny, fundamentalism, weapons of
mass destruction, and terrorism.
USADI supports the Iranian peoples' aspirations
for democracy, peace, human rights, women’s equality, freedom of
expression, separation of church and state, self-determination, control of
land and resources, cultural integrity, and the right to development
and prosperity.
The USADI is not affiliated with any government
agencies, political groups or parties. The USADI administration is solely
responsible for its activities and decisions.
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