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Weekly Commentary
The Fellowship of Appeasement
Last Monday, in another attempt to promote the policy of
appeasing Tehran, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright
and six former foreign ministers of major European countries and
Canada, co-authored an article in the Washington Post.
Recognizing that the European Union had ran out of “carrots” and
that Tehran was not showing any sign of abandoning its nuclear
weapons program, the authors insisted that the United States
should express mail a few “carrots” to the EU to compensate for
the latter’s utter lack of diplomatic backbone to stand-up to
the mullahs.
The authors, or more fittingly the fellowship of appeasement,
pleaded for American “subtle signals” to Tehran as the latest
round of nuclear talks between Iran and EU Big-3 began in
Brussels that same Monday.
Having met under the auspices of the Aspen Institute, the
authors wrote they had worked out some “new approaches on both
sides of the Atlantic” to bring about a better “balance of
carrots and sticks” to ensure that the temporary suspension of
Iran’s uranium enrichment would become a permanent one.
A few sentences later, it turned out that their “new approach”
package was anything but new. It is more or less a rehash of the
“grand bargain” idea floating around in Washington last summer:
accepting Iran’s right to a peaceful civilian nuclear energy
program, supplying it with fresh reactor fuel, and US
endorsement of recent EU nuclear accord with Tehran.
The crux of the approach, however, is that “Washington should
put its full support behind this diplomatic effort and consider
launching commercial and diplomatic engagement with Iran.”
Apparently, the former foreign ministers have a very short
memory and forgot that under their watch, the engagement fantasy
with Tehran got nowhere.
Mrs. Albright’s pistachio-caviar-carpet-apology diplomacy turned
out to be a humiliating and futile exercise at engaging a
corrupt and terrorist regime. A recent editorial in the
state-controlled Iranian daily Sharq, rejoiced over Tehran
exploiting Western overtures to the so-called reform. It said
while the world was busy tangoing with Khatami, Iran was going
full speed with its nuclear program.
Albright’s State Department blacklisted Iran’s main opposition
the People’s Mujahedeen in 1997 to assure the tyrants in Tehran
that Washington had no interest in regime change. Shortly
afterwards, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that
“The Iranians will get the point: We've just made it illegal for
Americans to support the Mujahedeen -- a group dedicated to
overthrowing the Iranian Government.” Clearly, this designation
was not about terrorism, it was about trying a “new approach”
toward mullahs.
Still, the more outrageous policy suggestion was that
“disagreements over the nuclear question need not, for example,
disrupt efforts to achieve cooperation on such matters as
narcotics enforcement, Iraq, the fight against terrorism and
peace in the Middle East.” To proffer that the idea of US
cooperating with Iran over Iraq and the fight against terrorism
one must be either delusional or naïve or both. Iranians are
involved in fomenting the chaos in Iraq up to their eyeballs.
Just listen to Iraq’s interim president, the vice-president, and
interior minister. On Wednesday, the Iraqi Defense minister
Hazem Shaalan called Iran “Iraq’s number one enemy” and said
Tehran wanted ''turbaned clerics to rule in Iraq.''
How could one think of working with a regime that even Mrs.
Albright’s State Department classified as the “leading state
sponsor of terrorism,” and was involved in the murder of several
hundred US servicemen in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and
responsible for the 444-day occupation of US embassy in Tehran?
One wonders whether the co-authors were referring to Tehran’s
definition of the “fight against terrorism”; a thinly veiled
reference to its demand from Washington and the EU to crackdown
on Iranian oppositionists abroad.
Contrary to what the fellowship of appeasement wants us to
believe, the more things have changed in Iran in the past
twenty-five years, the more they have stayed the same. The core
problem is this: Iran is ruled by a terror-sponsoring,
theocratic tyranny, which thrives on fascist-like suppression of
its own citizens and the export of terror and fundamentalism
abroad. It is intrinsically and structurally incapable of
change.
The solution is also as evident: The unseating of the ruling
regime by the Iranian people and their resistance movement. To
this end, Washington should part with its past record in Iran
and side with the Iranian people. The first step would be to
reject engagement and end the blacklisting of Iranian opposition
groups.
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The
Washington Times (Editorial)
December 12, 2004
Whitewashing Iran
In just the latest move that calls
into question the seriousness of its efforts to learn the truth
about Iran's nuclear weapons program, the International Atomic
Energy Agency apparently withheld information suggesting that
Iran had attempted to purchase large quantities of dual-use
material (items with civilian and military uses) which can be
used to detonate an atomic weapon.
… According to the news agency, a
"non-U.S. diplomat" said that information about Iran's work with
beryllium was included in an early draft of the IAEA report on
inspections in Iran, but was taken out of the final report after
Tehran objected. The information was also omitted from a report
issued last month by the IAEA Board of Governors.
That same IAEA board rejected U.S.
efforts to have Iran's behavior referred to the U.N. Security
Council for action, opting instead for a weak alternative plan
devised by Britain, France and Germany requiring that Iran
freeze part of its nuclear program. This plan devised by the EU
3 specifies that the Iranian freeze is "non-binding" and
"voluntary." In other words, Iran faces no meaningful penalties
for ignoring the freeze whenever it chooses…
Publications such as the London
Sunday Telegraph and Jane's International Defense Review
reported that, in 1994, the United States prevented Tehran from
purchasing beryllium in Kazakhstan. After the CIA learned that
Iranian agents had visited a processing plant there, U.S. agents
reportedly purchased the entire inventory. The beryllium —
enough to produce 20 nuclear warheads — was transferred to the
United States to be modified for nonmilitary uses. There have
been subsequent published reports suggesting that Tehran
continues to try to obtain beryllium.
Since it was forced to begin
dealing with the issue last June, the IAEA has to its credit
issued a series of reports showing that Iran has been cheating
and concealing its nuclear program from public view for nearly
20 years. Our central criticism of Mr. ElBaradei had been his
unwillingness to be sufficiently vigorous in holding Iran
accountable for malevolent behavior that has been publicly
documented…
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FrontPage Magazine
December 14, 2004
The Mullahs'
Killing Fields
A former political prisoner and the daughter of two slain
parents vowed to make sure the voices of Iranians who have
suffered under the Islamic fundamentalist regime heard. The two
women said they stand by other activists who continue to be
arrested, tortured, and executed in Iran for supporting freedom
and democracy.
On the occasion of International Human Rights Day (Friday,
December 10), the torture and execution of political prisoners
in Iran was the focus of a briefing in New York hosted by the
non-governmental organization Women’s Freedom Forum. The
treatment of women, especially women political activists, was
featured.
The walls of the room were lined with documentary posters with
names and photographs of men, women, and children who had been
killed by the mullahs in Iran. A number of the photographs were
family groups – mother, father, and two, three, four, five, even
six children ‑ that had been killed by the Iranian regime for
their political activism.
The program included videos and photographs of trials, lashings
and executions over the past 25 years. Some images were from the
early days of the revolution, some from the late 1980s, and one
photograph showing the hanging of a group of seven men in
Zahedan just three days before the event on December 7, 2004.
The victims are hoisted into the air by a crane in a public
place in order to terrorize the population and suppress further
resistance to the regime. Another Iranian-American pro-democracy
non-governmental organization ‑The Committee in Support of
Referendum in Iran‑sends out news clippings on a regular basis
that document the executions of men, women, and sometimes
children, as the Iranian regime executes minors.…
At the briefing, Farangis, a former political prisoner described
her experience and treatment by Revolutionary Guards in three
different prisons. She was born in 1959 in the southwestern
Iranian city of Masjid Suleiman in Khuzistan province. She
became a political activist after the revolution when she saw
the nature of the regime that Khomeini was constructing. She now
lives in the U.S. with her family.
The event concluded with Hajar, an 18 year old woman, whose
father, a medical student, was killed by the Iranian regime when
she was two years old and whose mother was killed by the Iranian
regime when she was eight years old, saying that although she
was a student with exams next week, she needed to be at the
event to make sure the voices of her parents are heard. She did
not want them to die in vain...
Excerpts
from an article by Donna M. Hughes, Professor & Carlson Endowed
Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
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