Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

Iran Lobby Desperation Shoots Skyward

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Hossein Mousavian-Iran's lobby

Hossein Mousavian- Former Iranian regime nuclear official and present lobby for the regime.

You can almost smell the desperation coming from the Iran lobby as it scrambles for an all-hands-on-deck effort to save the Iran nuclear deal before President Trump decides whether to withdraw from it by May 12.

One of the dedicated warriors for the Iran lobby is Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian regime nuclear official who wrapped himself in the cloak of academia at Princeton University as a faculty member.

In an editorial published by Reuters, Mousavian takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who earlier this week blistered Iran over its failure to disclose its nuclear program; calling the regime a liar.

Mousavian diligently checks off the talking points the Iran lobby has been flogging lately; namely that it was no secret what Netanyahu revealed, Iran has been in compliance under the nuclear agreement, and that President Trump and his foreign policy team were leading the U.S. to war with Iran.

He goes further by implying that the Trump administration’s “get tough” approach to Iran will not work.

“Implicit in Trump’s approach is that he can bully and pressure Iran into meeting his demands. However, the track record of U.S.-Iran relations since the 1979 Iranian revolution leaves little room to believe that Iran concedes to pressure,” Mousavian writes.

“I know from firsthand experience that Tehran responds to pressure by doing everything it can to produce leverage for itself. The modus operandi of Iranian leaders when it comes to addressing pressure is to become inflexible, steadfast and retaliatory,” he adds.

Mousavian finally reveals the first bit of truth. The mullahs are inflexible, steadfast and retaliatory, but that is not how they respond to pressure, it is their normal course of doing business.

For all of the cries of moderation by the Iran lobby during the negotiations for the deal in 2014-15, the reality has been a regime that have never wavered from its overriding goal of spreading its form of Islamic extremism at all costs around the world and build a Shiite sphere of influence protecting it from its many enemies.

To that end, the regime has admirably stubbornly held true to that goal by leveling Syria, overthrowing the government in Yemen, begging Russia to join the Syrian conflict and controlling Iraq through Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

Which is why Netanyahu’s central claim was never challenged by Mousavian and the rest of the Iran lobby: Iran has never deviated from its long-term plan to have nuclear weapons to use as leverage and a threat to its enemies and rivals.

But where Mousavian and the rest of the Iran lobby get it wrong is in saying that these moves by the Trump administration will push Iran into full-blown nuclear build mode.

The regime is already committed to such a path! Adhering to the deal doesn’t push them off their course. In fact, the appeasement policies practiced by the Obama administration have only made things worse. We have a track record of the past three years to show us exactly what the mullahs will do.

What brought Iran to the bargaining table in the first place back in 2015? Mousavian and his allies would have us believe it was diplomacy.

It wasn’t.

It was backbreaking economic sanctions imposed first by President George W. Bush and increased by President Obama, coupled with blocking Iran from accessing international currency exchanges which put Iran in the deep freeze money-wise.

Add to that the fracking boom in the U.S. driving the global price of oil down fast robbing the Iranian treasury of billions in cash from illicit oil sales and you begin to see how the decision to come to the bargaining table wasn’t driven by some desire for political moderation, but knee-capping sanctions that threatened the very existence of the theocratic state.

“If Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, he should not do so thinking Iran is vulnerable and in dire straits,” Mousavian said.

It is plainly apparent to even a closet regime cheerleader like Mousavian the Trump administration doesn’t view Iran on the brink of disaster. Far from it. It views the Iranian regime as robust, growing and a menacing threat to the entire Middle East.

The reason it is that way is because the nuclear deal held no restrictions on all other facts of the regime’s actions; allowing it to grow into the single biggest threat to global stability today.

The last-ditch nature of Mousavian’s missive is plain in his characterization of the protests rocking the mullahs’ control last year as “far smaller than made out to be” and pro-government demonstrations as “massive.”

The only thing true about that statement is that those government demonstrations were a massive failure and a sign of the desperate nature of the mullahs’ predicament.

It’s laughable that Mousavian ends his tirade by saying the end state for the Trump administration’s is war. The only war that is going to result from a withdrawal from the nuclear deal is an economic war as crippling sanctions are put back into place.

Mousavian says if the president wants “bigger deals” with Iran, he should build trust by implementing the nuclear agreement. The reverse is even more true.

If the mullahs want to avoid an economic meltdown that tosses them out of Tehran, they should build trust by burning their nuclear plans, dismantling their ballistic missiles and getting out of Syrian, Iraq and Yemen.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

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Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

Monday morning dawned across the U.S. to see the news dominated, not by talk of a Final Four match-up featuring Cinderella Loyola of Chicago and Sister Jean, but instead with an intense debate blowing up over President Donald Trump’s selection of former UN ambassador John Bolton to succeed H.R. McMaster as national security advisor.

The loquacious and quotable Bolton has been a frequent commentator and critic of the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal on Fox News and other media outlets and now finds himself in a key policy position to act on those beliefs.

Predictably the response from the Iran lobby was swift, vicious and stupefying. Leading the anti-Bolton charge was the National Iranian American Council, once a ley architect of Iranian appeasement and now finding itself virtually alone on an ever-shrinking game of foreign policy “Survivor” as it allies leave the scene to a newly muscular and empowered Trump administration.

Trita Parsi, NIAC president, issued a blistering statement condemning Bolton and blaming for everything short of triggering the Apocalypse.

“Bolton is an unhinged advocate for waging World War III. He has explicitly called for bombing Iran for the past ten years and has suggested the U.S. engage in nuclear first strikes in North Korea. Bolton’s first order of business will be to convince Trump to exit the Iran nuclear deal and lay the groundwork for the war he has urged over the past decade. Additionally, he has has called for ending all visas for Iranians, shipping bunker busting weapons to Israel, and supporting the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization and other separatist groups inside of Iran. The Iranian-American community and our pro-peace, pro-human rights allies will organize to stop Bolton’s plans from becoming a reality,” Parsi said.

In one paragraph, Parsi has managed to regurgitate virtually every false and misleading key message point the NIAC has articulated over the past five years.

  • Parsi calls Bolton “an unhinged advocate for waging World War III,” but neglects to parse any blame on an Iranian regime that has launched three wars on its own in Iraq, Syria and Yemen in the past three years;
  • Bolton has never called for nuking North Korea or Iran, but he has called for serious discussion about strike first policy options should Iran or North Korea move forward in developing nuclear capable ballistic missiles; a position virtually all Republican and Democratic congressional representatives have supported;
  • Bolton’s urging of the exiting the Iran nuclear deal is not a prelude to war—unless the mullahs in Tehran decide first—but rather a recognition that the deal did little to stymie Iranian extremism, halt terrorism or even delay Iran’s ability to lob nuclear weapons on missiles thousands of miles;
  • Parsi again takes a shot at one of the leading Iranian dissident groups in the MEK, using the “terrorist” label that has already been discredited. It’s also no coincidence Parsi refers to Iranian dissident and democracy groups as “separatist” groups refusing to acknowledge the widespread dissent and protests by ordinary Iranians sweeping across the country.

Parsi’s statement goes on to attack Bolton’s support of Iranian dissident groups as emblematic of war mongering, but Parsi doesn’t recognize the vast coalition of humanitarian, political, ethnic, religious and gender groups opposed to the Iranian regime including Amnesty International, members of the Bah’ai faith and virtually all Iranian women.

His focus solely on the MEK indicates the Iran lobby’s fears of recognizing the broad and deep resentment of the mullahs, especially the ever-unpopular rule of Hassan Rouhani.

Parsi’s hope that somehow slinging the MEK name around might somehow diminish Bolton’s chances for confirmation is a slim one since the MEK and the umbrella group of Iranian dissident and human rights groups it is part of, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has become an important source of information smuggled out of Iran about protests and the activities of the regime such as the secret development of its nuclear program in the first place.

Intelligence services in the EU and the U.S. have commended the quality and veracity of information supplied by these dissident groups, often at great risk to sympathizers in Iran who smuggle out photos and videos, including the most recent Iran protests across the nation.

Parsi and the rest of the Iran lobby know the end is here for their policy of appeasing the regime. Pompeo and Bolton are only vocal supporters of ending it. The real architect of getting tougher with Iran is the president himself who used the Iran nuclear deal as a potent message point with American voters on the campaign trail; most of whom were disillusioned in the wake of massive terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists inspired by Iran’s war in Syria.

For most Americans, the memories of Orlando, San Bernardino and Paris and Nice mingle with vivid images of handguns, trucks, bombs, knives and virtually any other tool grasped by terrorists to kill innocent people.

Parsi is never one for understatement so his statements aimed at Bolton are only natural, but the only unhinged one making crazy statements is Parsi which diminishes his authority and reasonableness in the eyes of many news organizations.

That of course hasn’t stopped the NIAC as it made Parsi and fellow staffers Reza Marashi and Jamal Abdi available to news media to talk Bolton. Considering the only news outlets that seem to have picked their comments are Russian and Iranian publications and an occasional Iranian regime advocate blog like Lobelog, we are heartened to see that fewer and fewer journalists frankly care what NIAC has to say.

The problem with the histrionics of Parsi and his Iran lobby colleagues is that when you consistently scream at the top of your lungs and sound deranged, no one ends up listening to you.

In fact, the much-vaunted echo chamber of the Iran lobby only seems to echo with their own voices and no one else is listening.

Laura Carnahan

NIAC Tries to Defend Former Associate in State Department

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NIAC Tries to Defend Former Associate in State Department

NIAC Tries to Defend Former Associate in State Department

Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a State Department official who was instrumental in directing policy for completing the much-criticized Iran nuclear deal under the Obama administration, has been reassigned to other duties in the State Department by the Trump administration which has generated a flurry of lobbying activity by the Iran lobby.

The National Iranian American Council organized an effort to denounce the move in a letter sent to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and acting Secretary of State John Sullivan even though the reassignment was made last April 2017.

The genesis for this new round of false outrage though was a Politico story that discussed email conversations between administration officials calling into question her political loyalty. In essence, the NIAC and its brethren were objecting to that age-old political practice of “cleaning house” when a new party and administration comes to power.

Where was the NIAC’s outrage when the Obama administration led its own purge of Bush-era appointees and installed its own loyalists in key civil service positions at the end of its own term to ensure policies were continued in spite of the new Trump administration’s move in?

To say the NIAC’s outrage is silly is an understatement. Every president reserves the right to pick and choose whomever he likes to serve and carry out his policies. Every president is also entitled to move or reassign any federal employee that does not wish to carry out that administration’s policies.

It is no different for someone like President John F. Kennedy taking over for Dwight D. Eisenhower or Bill Clinton taking over for George H.W. Bush.

But in the twisted logic of the NIAC, it seems even that most basic of presidential prerogatives is off-limits when it comes to keeping a trusted ally in the heart of policy-making when it concerns the Iranian regime.

In the case of Nowrouzzadeh, her involvement in policy towards Iran under the Obama administration has been well-documented.

Born in the U.S. to Iranian parents, Nowrouzzadeh has worked in various government capacities including the Defense Department in 2005 as a foreign affairs analyst and later the State Department in a similar capacity. She later joined the Obama White House in the National Security Council as a director for Iran and part of the team responsible for the Iran nuclear deal.

What raises the suspicions of many though was her prior stint working for NIAC which seems to have been purged from her bios and NIAC’s public records. Why? Obviously, association with the Iran lobby group can be fatal to a career civil servant’s future job prospects and it has been in Nowrouzzadeh’s case.

Also, her key involvement in crafting an agreement that President Trump has openly derided also has proven disadvantageous.

While the reassignment is common in new administrations, the furor is not as the NIAC has chosen to use her as a stalking horse for attacking the Trump administration yet again as ardent Iran-haters and racists.

It is sad to see the NIAC elevate her case and drag her through the public mud in order to score political points over an action that every incoming president undertakes throughout history.

What this does reveal though is NIAC’s willingness to cast any stone in wild attempts to attack the Trump administration in some blind hope of slowing down the freight train of change barreling towards the Iranian regime.

The setbacks for NIAC are numerous and significant:

  • Its attacks on the Saudi government have failed to prevent a historic realignment in the Middle East of nations united against Iran’s regime and containing its expansion;
  • Its efforts to keep alive the Iran nuclear deal are on life support as President Trump has decided to install Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and former UN ambassador John Bolton as the new National Security Advisor. Both are ardent opponents of the nuclear deal;
  • Its struggle to deny democratic protests sweeping through Iran and bolster the fraudulent regime of Hassan Rouhani have only proven to news media how out of touch NIAC is with current events.

Oddly enough, Nowrouzzadeh could have settled this entire unhappy episode herself by simply advising President Trump’s incoming foreign policy team on the best methods for improving the nuclear agreement she had just worked to implement.

If you want to show your non-partisan, unbiased credentials, then all one has to do is provide the other point of view.

In her case, and because of the effort by NIAC to leverage her reassignment, the sad truth is that policy making in the State Department became highly politicized under the Obama administration, especially towards Iran.

Her reassignment is only the tip of the iceberg since if President Trump is going to finally hold the Iranian regime accountable for its support of terrorism and unbridled human rights failures, he will most likely need to reassign many more Nowrouzzadehs and that is the future that NIAC is terrified of.

 

IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

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IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

“War!” The talking point pours out of the mouths of Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council about as often as he tweets it seems. Parsi and his colleagues have always waved the banner of war as a means of distracting from the key issues continually dogging the Iranian regime such as its miserable human rights record.

During the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, the specter of war was a near-constant theme sounded by the NIAC, even though there was never any real prospect of a conflict with the Iranian regime under the Obama administration.

It was however a convenient tool to use in the so-called “echo chamber” of public opinion created by the NIAC in collaboration with a White House intent on landing a PR win at almost any cost, including appeasing the mullahs in Tehran.

Even after the deal was struck and the Iranian regime launched a series of wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the chorus of the Iran lobby continued to warn that any effort to take action against Iran would inevitably result in war.

It was a silly argument; akin to saying that trying to stop the burglar robbing your house would only lead to more violence so one should leave him to his thievery.

After President Donald Trump took office and installed an administration openly skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal, the Iran lobby continued to warn that any effort to rein in Tehran’s militant actions would only lead to war. This included doing everything in the PR/lobbying handbook to preserve the nuclear deal that delivered billions in cash to the mullahs to help fund their wars and ballistic missile program.

Now the president has decided to shuffle his cabinet by moving Mike Pompeo from the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency to become Secretary of State, replacing the outgoing Rex Tillerson.

The change represents a potential realignment of U.S. foreign policy hewing more closely to the promises made by candidate Trump on the campaign trail when he called the Iran nuclear deal the worst deal ever made and vowed to tear it up for a new one.

Predictably, Parsi and the NIAC went on the offensive in near hysterical warnings of war. The NIAC issued a statement that blasted the appointment of Pompeo, a noted and vocal critic of the Iran nuclear deal.

“Mike Pompeo’s nomination for Secretary of State could have profound implications for the fate of the Iran nuclear deal and the prospect of a new war in the Middle East. While serving in Congress, Pompeo’s positions on foreign policy were often ideological and tended towards militarism rather than diplomacy. His opposition to the Iran deal – including the political hijinks he engaged in to undermine U.S. negotiators – and his comments suggesting that military strikes would be more effective than diplomacy, raise serious questions about his fitness to serve as America’s top diplomat,” the NIAC statement read.

“It may result in a dramatic escalation of tensions in the Middle East and a war with Iran.”

Of course, Pompeo’s position as CIA director provided him with the ultimate access to the most conclusive information on whether or not Iran was truly adhering to the terms of the nuclear deal, as well as the full scope of the regime’s activities, especially its support for proxy terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

His elevation by President Trump sets the stage for what Iranian dissidents have been calling for all along which is an honest, unabashed focus on the Iranian regime’s conduct and not the false promises being made by the mullahs and their cheerleaders in the Iran lobby.

In this case, actions speak louder than words and the regime’s actions over the past two years since the deal was approved lay bare the lies that have been consistently spouted.

It’s no secret that Pompeo has been a harsh critic of the Iranian regime, calling out its brutality towards dissidents and use of its police forces to crack down on protests.

“Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are the cudgels of a despotic theocracy,” Pompeo said in a speech last October. “They’re the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”

A week later, he told the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) that Trump is of the same mind.

“The president has come to view the threat from Iran as at the center of so much of the turmoil that bogs us down in lots of places in the Middle East, right? Whether it’s Lebanese Hezbollah, the threat that it presents to both Lebanon and to Israel; whether it’s the Shia militias—you can see the impact that they’re having today,” Pompeo said.

That kind of tough talk and brutal honesty is what has driven a recalcitrant North Korea back to the bargaining table after three years of brazen missile launches and should prove to be equally effective against the mullahs in Tehran.

Appeasement has never historically worked. It didn’t work against Hitler in Munich and it certainly didn’t work against Ali Khamenei in Geneva.

Seeing little hope of finding anymore receptive audiences in the U.S., Parsi and the NIAC have increasingly turned their message to European audiences and the regime has followed suit as regime-controlled media have already begun trying to shape the narrative about Pompeo by urging Europe to act as a balance against the Trump administration.

“Pompeo is very interested in waging a war similar to the Iraq war by citing international regulations,” said Alo Khorram, a former Iranian envoy to the United Nations, in the daily newspaper Arman. “European powers will play a role in balancing his desire.”

While the NIAC continues to panic, the clock may finally be running out on the reign of the Iranian regime.

Michael Tomlinson

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

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Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former official with the Iranian regime who transplanted to Princeton University and remade himself into a scholar, has been busy advocating for his old bosses; the mullahs in Tehran.

Even though he presided over various aspects of the regime’s security apparatus and was responsible for essentially hiding its clandestine nuclear program, he has worked diligently from his university perch to push the same old narratives supporting the Iranian regime.

One of his most recent key messages has been to push the narrative surrounding the growing confrontations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In an essay he wrote for the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Mousavian dives deeply into the discussion and tries to frame Saudi Arabia’s opposition to growing Iranian influence as part of a larger U.S. security plan to maintain control in the region.

“The chief rivalry in the region—between Saudi Arabia and Iran—is in fact a proxy for the competition between states seeking multipolarity (Iran) and those seeking to bandwagon off continued U.S. regional and global hegemony (Saudi Arabia),” he writes.

“Given Iran’s expanding regional influence, the foremost concern of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and some other regional Arab states is that as the United States disengages from the Middle East and Persian Gulf, the subsequent vacuum is not filled by Iran and Iran’s allied powers. This worry is amplified by the fact that the Arab World is in decline and traditional Arab powers have either collapsed or are stricken with domestic crises,” Mousavian adds.

He tries to make the same stale argument similarly made by other Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council that Iran is merely filling in the natural power vacuum resulting from waning American influence and that Iran is on the ascendancy, so it should naturally take a more preeminent position.

Couple this with a decaying and decadent Arab world, it makes sense for Iran to be a natural power in the Middle East according to Mousavian.

Unfortunately, the reality is much different than the picture he tries to paint. Far from being a rising power that used its economic clout, political influence of even cultural impact to influence the region, the Iranian regime has instead used its Revolutionary Guards and Quds Force to militarily intervene in neighbors such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen, while it has funded and directed proxies such as terror groups like Hezbollah and Houthi rebels to topple government and carry out attacks.

Far from using the financial windfall it gained from the nuclear deal to better and improve its own economy and lift the poorest Iranians, the mullahs instead opted to divert billions on a crash program to build and deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile capability that has threatened its neighbors with the prospect of weapons of mass destruction raining down on them.

These are not the acts of a nation interested in being a friendly partner, but rather a brutal regime intent on subverting and controlling its neighbors in order to create an extremist Islamic version of the old Warsaw Pact to protect itself.

Mousavian also touts Iran’s willingness to fight terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but neglects to mention that through its own terrorist network through Hezbollah, Iran conducts terrorist operations far from the battlegrounds of the Middle East and specifically targets and kills U.S. personnel; most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Appallingly, Mousavian takes Saudi Arabia to task for the conflict in Yemen, blaming it for causing a humanitarian crisis there. He attempts to draw on historical claims of Houthi governance there and that the Saudis had engineered an overthrow.

What he again fails to point out is that the war in Yemen didn’t start until Iran armed Houthi rebels, supplying them with guns, mortars, rockets and communications equipment and regularly supplies them through clandestine Iranian fishing vessels; some of which have been intercepted by U.S. and Saudi navy ships.

Mousavian goes on to make similar claims that Saudi Arabia is responsible for instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and even Palestine and Israel. For Mousavian, Saudi Arabia seems to be the most powerfully destabilizing force in the Middle East. About the only thing he doesn’t seem to blame Saudi Arabia and its primary patron, the U.S., for is global warming.

Lastly, Mousavian takes aim at Iranian resistance groups, including the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which he claims conducts terrorist acts on Iranian soil, but also neglects to mention the long history of open warfare by the Iranian regime against its members and other Iranian dissidents; including assassinations carried out by its Quds Forces and attacks on unarmed refugees at camps in Iraq.

“These realities have compelled Iran to have an active, preemptive, and deterrent role in the region in order to secure it borders, centralized governance, and national cohesion. To achieve these aims, Iran’s foreign policy goals have been centered on confronting threats, stabilizing the region, and improving its self-sufficiency in the production of weapons of deterrence, including ballistic missiles,” Mousavian claims.

But ultimately Iranian regime has done little to stabilize the Middle East. In fact, since the nuclear deal, it has in fact been the chief antagonist and leading participant in the wars that have raged there. Even as of this month, the Iranian regime escalated conflicts in Syria when its forces approached a U.S. base along the Syria-Iraq border which resulted in attacks by U.S. aircraft.

If any nation is interested in establishing permanent military bases far from its borders, it is the Iranian regime and the rapid pace of confrontations with the U.S., Saudi Arabia and others only underscore the regime’s willingness to up the ante in terms of spreading conflict.

The real enemy isn’t Saudi Arabia as Mousavian claims, but rather the mullahs in Tehran and the Iran lobbyist that cover for them.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

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Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

The Iran Lobby must be sweating the protests in Iran and their impact on Trump administration’s views on whether to kill the Iran nuclear deal. In many ways one of the key things holding the Trump administration back from killing the deal outright is how to manage the aftermath with mullahs desperate to hold onto power who may choose bloody violence to instead of diplomacy or giving up their hold on power.

Deciding to kill the nuclear deal is not a knee-jerk reaction, nor should it be done without an end game in place to help manage some sort of peaceful regime change and transition from theological dictatorship to peaceful democracy.

The mullahs have already evidenced their willingness to use brute force and mass murder to hold onto power. They demonstrated it after the disputed 2009 elections and they showed it again this year with the populist movement that grew from deep dissatisfaction among ordinary Iranians over their impoverished state of living.

Now the mullahs are faced with threats on multiple fronts, not the least of which is a new U.S. administration largely skeptical of them and their false promises.

What have the mullahs done?

They’ve put the Iran lobby into overdrive to defend the nuclear deal and throw as much mud as possible at President Donald Trump.

Leading the charge has been Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, but he has been joined by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian regime nuclear official who relocated to a position at Princeton University refashioning himself as a Middle East security expert/

While Parsi has been busy shooting off editorials at a rapid clip, Mousavian joined him in the literary parade with a recent commentary in Reuters.

Like Parsi, Mousavian trots out the usual defense of the nuclear deal as being set on a foundation of the “highest standards on nuclear transparency and inspections ever negotiated,” but there is a yawning chasm between reality and fantasy.

He also echoes almost verbatim Parsi’s key messages on the deal’s terms being only temporary after which Iran would fall under safeguards from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He of course neglects to mention that the IAEA failed to detect Iran’s clandestine nuclear development program in the first place. Similarly, he fails to mention how the IAEA failed to halt North Korea’s march to nuclearization and that both Iran and North Korea could and did opt to throw inspectors out and disable cameras and monitoring equipment.

What is to stop Iran from doing the same thing now? Harsh language? The reality is nothing.

Mousavian also criticizes the Trump administration’s effort to link Iran’s ballistic missile program to nuclear sanctions as well as question whether or not the mullahs should ever possess the right to develop nuclear technology.

While Mousavian claims Iran has a “sovereign right” to do so, he ignores the broader and more strategic question being raised by President Trump: Why does a violent, religiously-governed dictatorship ever need a nuclear program?

Iran has always claimed its nuclear program is peaceful and designed for energy development, but those claims ring hollow given the economic conditions in Iran and the global energy map in which nuclear power is rapidly becoming obsolete. In the U.S. alone, the nuclear power industry has been decimated by renewable energy sources, the low cost and abundance of natural gas and the conversion of industries to solar and off-peak battery storage have made it irrelevant.

More importantly, the maniacal nature of the mullahs’ governance makes development of nuclear power an idiotic choice for any nation to allow. Mousavian claims peaceful intent but the true intentions of the regime have been clearly demonstrated and that is to develop a militarized nuclear capability so it can dominate its neighbors, especially chief rival Saudi Arabia.

Mousavian grasps at straws when he claims the killing of the nuclear deal will only spread global distrust of the U.S. and make any deal with North Korea impossible.

With all due respect, that is an idiotic statement to make. No one on the planet sincerely believes that North Korea’s meglo-maniacal leader has any intention of real negotiations with the West over his nuclear toy kit.

The Iranian regime has worked diligently to undermine the nuclear deal right from the start by eradicating all traces of its nuclear work at suspected sites before inspection, restricting access by inspectors from any military sites, only allowing collections of soil samples by regime officials and not dismantling centrifuges that refine uranium.

More worrisome, Mousavian never takes up the issue of the Islamic dictatorship itself. It is cruel, barbaric and actively engaged in supporting terrorism and involved in wars and insurgencies in three countries.

If a government acts in a way that is openly hostile to its neighbors and places little value on the lives of its own people—even murdering them on a mass scale for political disobedience—why on earth would we ever allow them to possess a capability to develop a weapon of mass destruction?

The greatest historical lesson parallel to Iran is Nazi Germany. If Hitler’s Germany raced to develop a nuclear capability prior to World War II, we might all be living an episode of the “Man in the High Castle” on Netflix given how the West tried to appease Hitler by giving away Czechoslovakia, Austria and the Sudetenland.

Following the same approach to Iran and its bloodthirsty leaders such as Ali Khamenei is the same kind of lunacy that plunged the world into a global war that lasted six years.

Mousavian clinches the irony trophy when he writes:

“Rather than challenging his predecessor’s legacy Trump should endeavor to use it as a model to bolster multilateral diplomacy and resolve crises in places such as Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan. Today more than ever, the world needs a balanced and rational White House to promote peace and security rather than to flout international norms.”

Mousavian mentions conflicts that Iran is directly responsible for starting and expanding. It is not the White House that needs to be balanced and rational, but rather it is Tehran that needs to be dragged kicking a screaming into normalcy and peace.

Michael Tomlinson

Trita Parsi’s Myths

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Five Myths About Trita Parsi

Five Myths About Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council, has been hard at work pushing the mythology of how the U.S. and President Donald Trump are really aiming for all-out war with the Iranian regime.

His beating of the war drum is nothing new. He’s been doing it ever since the administration of President George W. Bush and while he found a receptive audience during President Barack Obama’s tenure, he’s finding it tough sledding these days.

A prime example of his fake news narrative is in an editorial he wrote in the Washington Post in which he outlines “five myths about Iran.”

It’s notable that he does admit—finally—that the Iranian regime has been demonizing the U.S. for the past four decades with “Great Satan” characterizations and other false claims, but that is just cheap throwaways to help in aiding his perception of being a “moderate” when in fact all he cares about seems to be preserving a badly flawed nuclear deal.

Of course his top myth is about that same nuclear deal. Parsi posits that it’s a myth that the deal only delays the inevitable building of a nuclear weapon by the mullahs.

While Parsi admits that restrictions on advanced centrifuges and other technology to make weapons-grade uranium expires after only 10-15 years, he argues that inspections are enough to tamp down the threat.

The real myth from Parsi is that inspections alone are enough to stop the mullahs. He neglects to mention how prior inspections regimens failed to halt Iran from beginning a nuclear program in the first place and in the case of North Korea, inspections failed spectacularly.

Parsi’s second myth is that killing the Iran nuclear deal would not help the protestors in Iran. He argues that killing it would actually hurt protestors striving to break free from the rule of the mullahs. The reality is that Parsi’s “do-nothing to rock the boat” advice goes all the way back to the fierce election protests in 2009 in which the Obama administration stood on the sidelines as regime police mercilessly killed scores of protestors.

The reality is that killing the deal would cement for Iranians that the nuclear deal was a complete failure and that Hassan Rouhani basically lied to the Iranian people when he promised reforms and economic improvements with its passage. In fact, the billions Iran received in sanctions relief went to fund war efforts and line the pockets of the ruling mullahs and Iranians know it and they are pissed.

Parsi’s silly myth is that the Green Movement was a failure. He argues that it, in fact, was a success and helped usher in an era of liberalization in Iran. He even says that Rouhani’s election is proof of that liberalization.

If he wasn’t so serious, his claim would be hilariously funny.

Rouhani’s administration has made his predecessor’s reign look like a picnic. More Iranians have been executed under Rouhani than at any time since the Islamic revolution. Iran has been plunged into wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and it accelerated the spread of radical Islamic terrorism across the globe. Furthermore, the Iranian people have no illusions about any reform and/or moderation within the mullah’s hierarchy. This could well be hear in the slogans of the protesters chanting: “Hardliners, Reformers, game is over”.

Some moderation.

Parsi’s last myth is that “Iranians hate Americans.” Another ridiculous idea to try and stir controversy since Parsi knows full well that Americans don’t hate Iranians and Iranians don’t hate Americans.

The conflict has always been about Iran’s mullahs and the ruling theocracy and the Revolutionary Guards they control.

The frustration of American presidents and Congress has always been embodied by people such as top mullah Ali Khamenei and the vast network he controls that does his bidding.

Parsi tries mightily to frame this debate as American leaders provoking Iran and beating a war drum with heavy-handed views aimed squarely at ordinary Iranians.

The reality is far and away nothing close to what Parsi tries to paint. The myths he cites are in fact not myths Americans have about Iran. In fact, Americans view Iran through a much more discerning and educated view.

They have had two years since the Iran nuclear to judge Iran’s mullahs on their actions; not their promises and have found them wanting.

The trail of destruction left behind by Iranian regime’s policies are proof enough. The smuggling of weapons into Yemen and the incitement of a revolution to topple a lawful government and push Saudi Arabia to the brink of war.

The wholesale slaughter of Syrians while supporting the criminal regime of Bashar al Assad and producing the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

These are just some of the actions taken by the Iranian regime that has put Parsi’s myths to rest and instead provided living proof of why his fake news is no longer finding an audience among the American people.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Tries to Separate North Korea from Iran Regime

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Iran Lobby Tries to Separate North Korea from Iran Regime

Iran Lobby Tries to Separate North Korea from Iran Regime

In the long-running battle to combat the falsehoods of the Iran lobby, this site has uncovered the facts behind some of the most ridiculous assertions made by Iranian regime advocates such as the National Iranian American Council.

We’ve unveiled the inner workings of the lobby, its intertwined relationships with families of regime officials and the consistency its messages are aligned with those pushed by the regime.

Since the start of negotiations for the nuclear agreement over two years ago, we’ve documented the multiple falsehoods uttered by the Iran lobby in support of the deal, such as that it would help empower “moderate” elements in Iran’s government and usher in an age of international cooperation and good will.

Of course, none of that has come to pass and we’ve hit the Iran lobby hard on the utter failure of their promises. Iran has become arguably the most destabilizing force in the Middle East right now next to the Islamic State.

While ISIS has time and again spread its terror operations around the world, including most recently in Barcelona, Spain, the real linchpin to regional destabilization has been the Iranian regime and its proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Most importantly though, Iran has helped fuel the sectarian nature of the conflicts going on, introducing the deep schism dividing Sunni and Shia populations and setting their respective governments against each other.

The mullahs in Tehran have sought to divide and conquer the Arab world and the result has been widespread chaos. Throughout all this, the Iran lobby has steadfastly sought to shift blame to more traditional whipping posts including the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It didn’t matter which U.S. administration was in office or which political party controlled Congress; the Iran lobby always found it convenient to shift blame away from Iran no matter what the transgression was such as appalling human rights violations or the deepening wars in neighboring countries.

The arrest of dual-national Iranians? Blame the U.S. policy on immigration.

The execution of Iranians convicted as children with false confessions extracted under torture? Blame the opium trade from neighboring Afghanistan.

The miserable economic conditions strangling the Iranian people? Blame U.S. sanctions.

The Iran lobby has consistently always shifted blame and never affixed it squarely where it belonged: the mullahs in Tehran.

Now comes one of the more incredibly ridiculous claims made yet by the Iran lobby in the form of an editorial by Reza Marashi of the NIAC in Haaretz, which warned the U.S. from using the North Korean threat as a tie-in to Iran.

“First, conflating Pyongyang and Tehran is troublesome for an obvious reason: One has the bomb, and the other does not,” writes Marashi in one of the more glaring misstatements ever uttered by a member of the Iran lobby.

Iran’s own president, Hassan Rouhani, declared to Iranian lawmakers this week that Iran could walk away from the nuclear deal and restart its nuclear program in a “matter of hours” and bring a weapon to fruition in short order.

The gap between North Korea and Iran’s nuclear capabilities was supposed to be measured in years according to the Iran lobby, but in reality it’s only a matter of hours.

Marashi then goes on to claim that American policies in confronting other rogue regimes with nuclear ambitions such as Libya and Iraq have only motivated the Iranian regime to work harder to build their nuclear program.

Let’s think about that piece of fetid logic for a minute.

Iran only pursues a nuclear program because of American efforts to restrain other rogue regimes to create their own nuclear arsenals? Rarely have we read a more bizarre theory than that one.

But Marashi doesn’t stop there. He tries to tie in the Trump administration’s decision to kill the Transpacific trade deal and pull out of the Paris climate change agreements as motivating factors for Iran not to trust the U.S. on the nuclear deal.

The cherry on top of Marashi’s bloviating is the contention that the North Korea deal was doomed to failure since the U.S. never had any intention of ever allowing the Hermit Kingdom to ever develop a nuclear capability and thus provides an impetus for Iran to believe the U.S. is similarly disingenuous with its deal.

“If Trump corrects course and fully implements Washington’s JCPOA obligations, the risk of Tehran pursuing Pyongyang’s path is slim to none. The longer he continues violating the terms of the deal, the more likely it becomes that Iran resumes systemically advancing the technical aspects of its nuclear program – without the unprecedented, state-of-the-art monitoring and verification regime currently in place,” Marashi added.

These claims by Marashi are not even worth calling an obfuscation. They are clearly falsehoods. Tehran always intended to follow a nuclear pathway and ensured that the nuclear deal would preserve its enrichment infrastructure and allow it to restart quickly without any serious interruption.

Also, the “state-of-the-art monitoring” Marashi cites is neither state of the art, nor is it any meaningful monitoring. The agreement gave away any serious oversight by prohibiting international inspectors from most of Iran’s military bases and allowing collection of soil samples only after extensive scrubbing and removal of topsoil and only by Iranian hands to be handed over to inspectors.

But what is most appalling is how Marashi never mentions the word “missile” which is the most glaring connection between Iran and North Korea and the real reason why the two nations are indeed joined at the hip.

North Korea jump started Iran’s ballistic missile program by licensing its technology in the first place and has provided steady upgrades, improvements and technical advice. Iran is now following the exact playbook North Korea has followed in building ever-increasingly powerful missiles that can now reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korean officials have made regular visits to Iran and vice versa to exchange technical data and now there have been increasing news reports of the potential for Iranian scientists working in North Korea on learning its manufacturing processes for building nuclear warheads for its missiles.

Marashi is not only wrong, he is again engaging in the art of misdirection in trying to divert attention from the real alliance between Iran and North Korea.

Staff writer

Iran Tries Blackmail in Threatening Failed Nuclear Deal

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Iran Tries Blackmail in Threatening Failed Nuclear Deal

Iran Tries Blackmail in Threatening Failed Nuclear Deal

One of the key provisions of the Iran nuclear deal was an agreement to not include so-called “side issues” into the agreement such as the regime’s sponsorship of terrorism or any improvement in its human rights record.

The mullahs in Tehran knew they would instantly fail any of those litmus tests and fought hard to keep them out of the agreement, but in doing so they set themselves up for failure down the road when continued abuses would force the U.S. to act in levying new sanctions for terrorism support and Iran’s burgeoning ballistic missile program.

The mullahs found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. The nuclear agreement did not contain any language prohibiting economic sanctions on non-core nuclear issues per the mullahs’ demands so as the Trump administration and U.S. Congress imposed new sanctions the mullahs were left to cry foul without any basis to stand on.

The Iran lobby then went to work trying to stave off sanctions by pushing the message that these additional sanctions would threaten the “essence” of the agreement and cause its collapse leading to Iran building a nuclear arsenal.

Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council tried to blame President Donald Trump for the potential collapse of the deal and issued a statement that reeked of falsehoods commonly trotted out by the Iran lobby.

“It should now be clear that Donald Trump’s moves to violate and hold certification of the Iran nuclear deal in doubt are actively destabilizing the accord. Unfortunately, in response to Trump’s increasingly hostile rhetoric, as well as Congress’ moves to escalate sanctions, Iran is now warning that it has its own options to back out of the deal if the U.S. continues to undermine it,” Parsi said.

Let’s be clear: Iranian regime, not the U.S., is responsible for destabilizing the nuclear deal with their bloody war in Syria, efforts to sow insurrection in the Gulf states, and start launching ballistic missiles at a clip rivaling North Korea. The U.S. did nothing to inspire those acts and all those acts began actually years ago and under the Obama administration.

Also, the U.S. Congress and American electorate has had the luxury to see how the nuclear deal has turned out after two years and their answer has been overwhelmingly negative. While Parsi may try to affix blame on President Trump, the real culprits are in Tehran.

But Parsi didn’t stop there.

“We have repeatedly warned that President Trump’s beating of the war drum with Iran, even if confined to rhetoric, in addition to new Congressional sanctions and zero diplomatic outreach, could only produce negative consequences. Iran’s parliament has now voted to increase spending on its ballistic missile program and the IRGC in direct response to new sanctions on the country,” Parsi added.

Incredibly, Parsi tries to also blame the U.S. President for Iranian regime’s decision to ramp up its missile program; ignoring the fact the regime’s missile program was begun a decade ago with technology licensing agreements with North Korea and fully funded by illicit oil sales.

It is a blatant example of how the Iran lobby tries to rewrite history to protect the Iranian regime after it acts to toss away the international agreements it signs.

Regime president Hassan Rouhani did his part in warning the regime could quickly ramp up its nuclear program and achieve an advanced level if the U.S. continued its “threats and sanctions.”

Rouhani’s remarks to Iranian regime lawmakers were his most direct warning that the deal could fall apart and risked ratcheting up tensions with the United States.

While most media focused on Rouhani’s threats, virtually no one picked up on the key inconsistency he made which is that Iran could “quickly” build nuclear weapons. This simple declaration proves the biggest lie offered by the regime and Iran lobby supporters such as Parsi: the nuclear deal did not push back the much-debated “breakout” period for Iran to build a nuclear device.

“In an hour and a day, Iran could return to a more advanced (nuclear) level than at the beginning of the negotiations” that preceded the 2015 deal, Rouhani said.

The nuclear deal has been a complete and utter failure.

United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley issued a stern and forceful rebuke to Rouhani’s comments and accurately pointed out the problem with the arguments being made by the Iran lobby about saving the nuclear deal at all costs.

Haley said on Tuesday Iran must be held responsible for “its missile launches, support for terrorism, disregard for human rights, and violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions.”

“Iran cannot be allowed to use the nuclear deal to hold the world hostage … The nuclear deal must not become ‘too big to fail’,” Haley said in a statement, adding that new U.S. sanctions were unrelated to the Iran nuclear deal.

What is ironic in all this debating about Iran is how North Korea is widely reviled, heavily sanctioned and appropriately feared by the rest of the world over its ballistic missile program, but in the case of Iran’s missile program, the European Union has struggled to stay mute and not offend the mullahs.

Why does North Korea’s missile program drive the world to the brink of striking back, but in the case of Iran, many American partners refuse to criticize Iran?

Part of the answer lies in the Iranian regime’s aggressive efforts to open its markets to European firms to make investment and economic hamstring themselves from taking future action against Iran. Another explanation comes from EU policy makers who naively believe in the lies of the Iran lobby and hope for the best while ignoring the evidence of Iranian regime’s extremism.

Europe’s reaction is eerily similar to the reaction their predecessors had to the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

We can only hope the world doesn’t pay again for that same policy of appeasement.

Michael Tomlinson

Why Does the Iran Lobby Care About the Nuke Deal?

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Why Does the Iran Lobby Care About the Nuke Deal?

Why Does the Iran Lobby Care About the Nuke Deal?

The Iran lobby, including the National Iranian American Council and other groups, invested heavily in supporting the Iran nuclear deal. They lobbied for it, wrote editorials, sent out loads of press releases, made appearances on news programs, held meetings with elected officials and coordinated strategy with the Obama White House through countless meetings.

The Iran lobby ostensibly was doing all this in the name of peace and in support of a whole host of promised positives coming from its passage, including:

  • Bolstering moderate elements within the Iranian regime and aiding their cause in upcoming elections;
  • Shifting Iran back towards diplomacy and serving as a moderating force in a deeply destabilized Middle East;
  • Empower international inspectors to keep Iran under close scrutiny and push back its development of a nuclear weapon; and
  • Propel Iran’s re-entry in the community of nations and become a partner economically and politically with the world once again.

It was a nice idea and attractive to many in Congress. Unfortunately, like most good intentions, it fell flat on its face when confronted by the evil nature inherent within the ruling mullahs in Tehran.

The one thing everyone seemed to forget and the Iran lobby was careful to obscure was that the Iranian regime never really cared about a nuclear deal since the mullahs knew it would never halt their nuclear program, only postpone it slightly.

What they and their Iran lobbyist allies really cared about was the lifting of crippling sanctions that, more than anything else, was and still is the true goal of the regime and its allies.

Preserving the nuclear deal is not the real concern of the regime. It is the potential for the re-imposition of economic sanctions under a skeptical Trump administration and a reset back to 2012 in which the Iranian regime was on the verge of collapse and widespread dissatisfaction among the Iranian people still simmered from the violent crackdown on the 2009 democracy protests.

This is why the deal was crafted to preserve Iranian regime’s missile program and never take up the issues of human rights and terrorism since the mullahs had always planned to use the cash it received from the nuclear deal to jumpstart their ballistic missile program and keep the Assad regime afloat in Syria.

The mullahs and by extension the Iran lobby relied on the passiveness of the U.S. under Obama. As British politician Edmund Burke once famously said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

In this, the Iran lobby sought to dissuade action against Iran by promising a changed regime, but since none of that has happened and the situation throughout the Middle East has clearly gotten worse under the expansion of several proxy wars by Iran, the Iran lobby has shifted its tone and tactics to a much darker and fear-based message.

It now relies on the banging of war fears in trying to keep the nuclear deal alive as evidenced by the mounting PR push by groups such as the NIAC which put out a policy memo outlining how the Trump administration could undermine the nuclear agreement.

It is typically long-winded and rests its logic on the notion that President Trump can kill the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement by choosing not to certify the JCPOA or implementing “snap back” sanctions.

The NIAC memo then goes on to exhaustively explain the various steps the Congress would take in reviewing either action by the president.

What the NIAC does not discuss is the fact the Congress voted to pass new sanctions on Iran by stunningly huge bipartisan majorities that made clear no one actually believes in any of the promises made by the NIAC earlier.

Iranian regime has clearly become a threat not only to the U.S., but to the entire region as its ballistic missiles can now reach targets throughout Europe, Asia and Africa.

The NIAC briefing also glaringly misses the essential point of what is happening now which is the Iranian regime’s actions on human rights violations, sponsorship of terror and accelerating a missile program that will soon surpass North Korea is what is driving the debate about Iran; not the nuclear agreement.

But the NIAC hopes that focus on the JCPOA will deflect attention on these other areas where Iranian regime is so blatantly awful on right now. It is akin to pointing at the crack den and ignoring the building on fire right next to it.

You can see how the Iran lobby is trying to push issues such as terrorism and missiles off the front pages by talking about the nuclear deal, when the nuclear deal isn’t even the issue being debated by Congress and the Trump administration.

This is the “new” grand lie of the Iran lobby and its supporters. They hope that by focusing on the JCPOA and Iranian regime’s continued “compliance” with the agreement that mullahs’ regime in Iran is somehow still a good global citizen. The lobby never addresses the ballistic missile program or the threat it poses, especially with heightened concerns over North Korea. It also never deals with the horrific human rights violations Iranian regime and its IRGC has perpetuated in the Syrian conflict.

Unfortunately for the NIAC and other Iran lobby members, everyone has pretty much caught on to the lie and ignoring what they say which explains the overwhelming bipartisan push to target Iran.

For the NIAC, it quickly finds itself alone in Washington’s Beltway with few open supporters and even less leverage in trying to boost Iranian regime’s fortunes. It’s time for the NIAC to pack it in.

Michael Tomlinson