Iran Lobby

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

As Currency Plummets the Iran Regime Teeters on Collapse

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As Currency Plummets the Iran Regime Teeters on Collapse

As Currency Plummets the Iran Regime Teeters on Collapse

Iran’s currency, the Rial, is on a skydive plummet downward to historic levels and poses the most significant threat to the stranglehold the mullahs have had on the Islamic state.

Pegged to the price of petroleum, the Rial has been rocked by the global glut of oil and a stagnant economy riven through by rampant corruption and the diversion of billions of badly-need dollars to fund wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen as well as a massive military build-up including a ballistic missile program.

Now as Iran has been gripped by rising political tension with massive demonstrations sweeping across the country since last December, there has been a rush to the banks as Iranian citizens desperately try to cash out and swap to scarce U.S. dollars in a scene reminiscent of bank runs during the Great Depression.

The Rial has bled away a third of its value just this year alone with an exchange rate of 60,000 Rial to a single dollar. The track record for the mullahs in fiscal management is pretty rancid ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979 when one dollar bought 70 Rials.

Since Hassan Rouhani assumed power in 2013, 36,000 Rials equaled one dollar. The drop in value is as much a reflection of Iranians lack of confidence in their government as it is of an economy that is nearing Third World status.

The mullahs have reacted in their typical brutal manner setting an official exchange rate of 42,000 Rials to the dollar in an example of wishful thinking. To enforce that rate, the mullahs have promised harsh punishment including arrest for anyone trying to exchange Rials at a different rate than the one established by them.

The crisis is driven by an inability to access physical currency notes, which are estimated at only five percent of all foreign currency in Iran, while the rest is available in the form of credits for business and the government.

Long gone it seems are the images of pallets loaded down with dollars and euros being unloaded from airplanes as part of the ransom payment made by the U.S. in exchange for U.S. hostages as part of the Iran nuclear deal.

That nuclear deal has failed to deliver the benefits promised by Rouhani to ordinary Iranians; instead the regime has siphoned the economic relief it brought to state-owned industries and the powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps.

It has also failed to generate the flood of foreign investment promised by Rouhani with many foreign companies unwilling to risk capital in investments in Iran when the U.S. has contemplated additional sanctions for the regime’s abysmal human rights record and its involvement in the support of terrorism and the war in Syria.

The use of chemical weapons repeatedly by the Assad regime against its own citizens has also ostracized Iran for its support of Assad and the heavy use of Iranian military units in the conflict.

The sponsorship of the revolt in Yemen and support of Houthi rebels has also ignited another potential regional conflict with Saudi Arabia and brought the U.S. and Russia into contentious situations that could possibly start a wider war rattling any potential investors.

Other efforts by the Iranian regime to bring in more foreign currency include trying to increase oil production in order to generate more sales overseas, but that has been stymied by fields utilizing outdated equipment and failure to attract any significant foreign partners to develop oil fields.

“This currency crisis is another step in the collapse of the Iranian economy, which was expected to rebound after the signing of the nuclear agreement. Difficult economic conditions brought protestors to the streets in a number of Iranian cities earlier this year, however those protests were quelled by the government. It is important to continue watching the economic situation in Iran, because historically economic issues have typically led to the most significant political unrests in that country,” wrote Ellen R. Wald, a historian and scholar at the Arabia Foundation.

The regime hasn’t been helped by action this week by the European Union to extend sanctions on Iran over human rights violations in an effort to demonstrate its willingness to the Trump administration to hold Iran accountable, while trying to preserve the nuclear agreement.

France has pushed for new sanctions over Iran’s missile program and involvement in conflicts in the region, including in Syria where Tehran backs President Bashar al-Assad. Paris hopes that would show President Trump the EU takes his concerns seriously.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, offered in an editoRial in The Hill that the collapsing Rial represented an opportunity to apply even more pressure on the regime.

“The White House should re-impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran to vindicate currency traders’ fear that it now plans to inflict serious damage on Tehran’s economy,” they write.

“Based on our analysis of the Central Bank data, Iran’s currency has lost roughly half of its value, 46 percent, falling from 40,170 to 58,880 per dollar, since Trump put the future of the nuclear deal in doubt last October.  The Iranian economy looked particularly wobbly amidst protests in December when Iranians took to the streets to protest the regime-controlled banking sector, and lack of economic opportunity and political freedom,” they added.

They believe that additional pressure on Iran’s Central Bank could be the nudge necessary to send it into collapse and bring down the regime.

“Under the sanctions law applied prior to the nuclear deal, foreign financial institutions are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with the Central Bank. In effect, the Bank’s foreign-held accounts are put on lock down, barring the regime from accessing its foreign exchange reserves.  On paper, Iran may get paid for its oil but the money sits in the purchaser’s country and is only available for Iran to buy goods from that country in the local currency. Without access to these reserves, the regime would find it much harder to defend the Rial,” the article said.

The proverbial hammer blow this would deal to the regime is significant since the Central Bank provides the funding for the Revolutionary Guard Corps and supplies the cash for its activities in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

The irony is that the regime can be crippled without canceling the nuclear deal as the Iran lobby has feared and instead using the Rial as a leveraged weapon against the mullahs by hitting them where it hurts; wiping out popular support from the Iranian people.

Remember, the original revolution against the Shah was largely fueled by economic concerns before it was stolen by the mullahs. Wouldn’t it be delicious to see the same thing happen to them?

Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

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Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

The Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, have been busy hurling attacks and invectives at John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the new national security advisor, calling him everything from being crazy to a war monger to an extremist or child of Satan.

The accusations have seemed to take on a life of their own as Iranian regime loyalists such as NIAC’s Trita Parsi empty out the thesaurus in an effort to try and find something that will stick and either derail his nomination or throw cold water on the administration’s plans to revisit the Iran nuclear deal.

In either case, it seems apparent the trains have already left the stations and on Capitol Hill, it appears Democrats are only pondering going after President Trump’s CIA director nominee, Gina Haspel, for past involvement in the interrogation of terror suspects, with Bolton and secretary of state nominee, Mike Pompeo, looking like solid confirmations.

This new troika of national security, intelligence and diplomatic heads represents a significant shift in the president’s thinking as it relates to the challenges of Iran, North Korea and Islamic extremist terrorism.

Far from trying to swat individual terror suspects like so many mosquitos, it appears the administration maybe looking for a more strategic approach in draining the swamp so-to-speak by dealing directly with the sources of terrorism; more specifically nation states.

The terror attacks of 9/11 served as a reminder that safe harbors such as a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, provide training, security, funding and logistical support for terrorists to plan and execute their attacks.

The rise of ISIS out of the wreckage of a Syrian civil war and Iraqi sectarian conflict borne out of Iranian regime’s meddling carved out a caliphate which provided ISIS with everything from oil to sell and ready recruits to satellite broadcasts and a news magazine.

The Iranian regime set the template when it built Hezbollah to a formidable terrorist operation and shock troops for proxy wars. Iran mullahs utilized Hezbollah and a safe harbor in Lebanon.

But now the mullahs in Tehran are confronted with a rapid flurry of problems that have escalated nearly out of their normally iron-fisted control.

  • The explosion of U.S. fracking for oil turned it into the top oil producer in the world and forced prices to plummet on the open market, crushing revenues the mullahs were expecting from the lifting economic sanctions following the Iran nuclear deal. Coupled with the drain on cash reserves for propping up the Assad regime in Syria and spending heavily on military equipment, including building a ballistic missile program, Iran soon became a pauper nation;
  • A free-falling economy gave ordinary Iranians a gut-punch with stagnant wages, limited job opportunities and a deeply corrupt government that controlled almost all facets of the economy. Couple that with deep dissatisfaction over the increasing divide of haves vs. have-nots as those with ties to the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force or the ruling mullahs profited handsomely; and
  • Massive protests swept the nation as the combination of punishing economic conditions and dissatisfaction with oppressive rule, including morality laws specifically targeting Iranian women, drove ordinary Iranians to extraordinary acts of defiance unheard of in Iran. This included women launch the hijab movement with the mullahs responding by passing laws criminalizing it on the basis it promoted “prostitution” and calling for 10 years imprisonment.

These trends are unmistakable and more importantly, unassailable by the Iran lobby, which for the most part has stayed silent on these domestic protests; choosing only to blame the economic conditions on the U.S. not fully complying with the terms of the nuclear deal.

Apparently Parsi and his friends think we should empty out Ft. Knox on behalf of the mullahs.

What is apparent though is that the accusations being flung by the Iran lobby at Bolton’s nomination miss an inescapable truth which is Bolton is not setting the stage for war when Tehran has already been at war with the West ever since it supplied explosives to kill Marines in Beirut or U.S. troops in Iraq.

Ivan Sascha Sheehan, incoming executive director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore, makes that point in a strongly worded editorial in The Hill.

“Those who are concerned about the potential for war with Iran should embrace Bolton’s appointment and support the administration’s efforts to confront Tehran’s destabilizing regional influence by taking its theocratic regime to task. The regime’s misbehavior only worsened in the run-up to Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office, and particularly under the prior administration’s cooperative policies that engendered an even greater sense of impunity than the Islamic Republic was used to,” Sheehan writes.

“Trump’s assertiveness during his first year in office is paying small dividends. U.S. Navy officials recently reported that close encounters between their vessels and those of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which were commonplace over the previous two years, halted abruptly in August,” he added.

But what the Iran lobby is most fearful of is not a simple knee-jerk tearing up of the nuclear deal by President Trump, but rather a consensus among U.S. allies to rework the deal, toughening provisions on terror support, ballistic missile development and human rights improvement, in an effort to save it.

Using the deal as a leverage against the Iranian regime is fair turnabout since the regime and Iran lobby have used its continued existence as a blunt instrument against any calls to rein in the regime’s excesses.

The Economist outlined some of the intense deal-making going on now from Great Britain, France and Germany to compel the Iranians to accept new restrictions; restrictions that should have been included in the original deal in the first place.

“Sir Simon Gass, a former British ambassador to Tehran who led the British team negotiating the deal, says that it might be possible to get an agreement from Iran not to develop an intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of hitting America. An ICBM, he points out, only makes sense if it carries a nuclear warhead, so testing one should prompt broad economic sanctions. Patricia Lewis of Chatham House, another London think-tank, believes that the Europeans may already be talking to the Iranians about a future regional missile-deal that would ban long- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles,” the Economist editorial said.

Ultimately the real rub for Parsi and his fellow travelers is that new restrictions, coupled with worsening economic conditions will once again rollback Tehran back to 2009 when massive street protests nearly toppled the regime.

As the president’s new team take their place, it’s clear the era of appeasing the mullahs is dead.

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 Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

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NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

Apple reportedly shutdown access to its App Store to users and developers in Iran last week raising intense speculation as to why the tech giant restricted access, although Iranian users reported being able to access the store by the weekend.

Speculation ranged from potential U.S. sanctions looming on the horizon to the announcement of CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as U.S. Secretary of State.

The Iran lobby weighed in predictably as well, with the National Iranian American Council leading the blame game with a statement it issued in which it again displayed the irony of decrying Apple’s move, while at the same time never criticizing the Iranian regime’s weaponization of those some smartphone apps to identify and arrest potential dissidents and protestors.

Earlier this month, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the largest Iranian dissident group in the world, issued a report detailing how the Iranian regime has launched a sophisticated cybercampaign to deploy apps on Apple and Google’s app stores that mimic more well-known apps and allows the regime’s security services to monitor the activities of Iranian citizens, as well as export malware cyberattacks against U.S. citizens.

Starting with the massive election protests of 2009, smartphones have played a vital role in organizing opposition to the Iranian regime and helped share video, photos and audio of the brutality of the regime as it has arrested, beaten and even killed protestors over the years; culminating to the most recent protests that have rocked Iran over the past two months.

These include protests over poor economic conditions, rampant corruption within the regime and even over morality codes by women who have abandoned head scarves and posted photos on social media in a form of soft power protest that has landed many of them in prison.

Nearly 48 million Iranians have smartphones with about 70 percent of them having access to the internet, making Iran one of the more connected nations in the Middle East, but the regime has struggled to restrict Internet access and have tried to disrupt the usage of popular messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp by protestors.

The move by Apple, while not publicly commented on by the company yet, highlights the precarious nature of technology in Iran. The regime uses it as a prolific tool for cyberwarfare while the rest of the free world views it as an engine of change, commerce and communication.

The NIAC highlights this in its statement saying:

“Access to communication technology is important for both humanitarian as well as U.S. strategic interests, which is why exemptions for Internet communication tools were put in place under the previous Administration. Allowing these exemptions to fall by the wayside helps no one except those who seek to keep the Iranian people silent.”

It’s a laudable position to take, but hollow and empty when we consider how the NIAC has never criticized the Iranian regime for its manipulation of technology to restrict protests.

“We have already been in communication with the U.S. government about decisions late last year by Apple and Google to block Iranian developers from hosting applications on their platforms. We have emphasized the need to broaden exemptions to reverse such decisions and will redouble our efforts to address these new challenges,” the NIAC statement said.

It’s a twisted piece of logic by the NIAC since the NCRI report, as well as similar reports by national intelligence agencies, have long documented the Iranian regime’s use of Iranian programmers to create apps that have malware embedded in them and efforts to crack the encryption of apps such as WhatsApp.

But this exclusion of Iran from the Apple App Store is not the first time. Back in August of 2017, Apple removed all apps created by Iranian developers from its App Store as a result of U.S. economic sanctions.

Iran’s own Telecommunication Minister said the ban of Iranian-made apps would probably have a limited effect on the country’s economy and tech industry, as the US company had only an 11 percent market share in the country, according to a report from the New York Times, but the move was bound to hurt the regime’s intelligence gathering efforts.

Far from hurting Iranians, as the NIAC suggests, restricting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps access to these app stores benefits those Iranians who rely on clandestine technology to spread, share and collaborate in their dissent.

This is why the NIAC continually misses the mark in its position papers and statements because of its slavish devotion to the Iranian regime and an uncompromising reluctance to ever criticize Tehran on anything.

The NIAC should be focused on the cyberwall the regime operates allowing it to monitor virtually all Internet activities of the Iranian people. The NIAC should be calling on the regime to end its use of bogus social media apps to monitor its own people. The NIAC should call for the release from Iranian jails any Iranian being detained for posting a video or photo that violated the regime’s draconian morality codes.

The NIAC should speak on behalf of freedom and democracy and not try to support a regime that is slowly dying from the corruption that is rotting the core of the Iranian government.

That rot has become so apparent to the Iranian people that they have been motivated to post online their own protests and Apple and other Western companies should be encouraged to do more to obstruct the Iranian regime and aid these people in their quest for freedom and democracy.

Michael Tomlinson

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

US Pressure on Iran Missile Program Pushing Europe to Act

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US Pressure on Iran Missile Program Pushing Europe to Act

US Pressure on Iran Missile Program Pushing Europe to Act

The Trump administration has been applying diplomatic pressure on the Iranian regime over its ballistic missile program and support for terrorism and has consistently raised the specter of invalidating the Iran nuclear deal by certifying the regime as being out of compliance with its provisions.

For those efforts, the administration has been roundly and harshly criticized by the Iranian regime’s allies, especially within the Iran lobby by groups such as the National Iranian American Council and individuals such as Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former regime nuclear official who now masquerade’s as an academic at Princeton University.

The vitriol being thrown at the administration over this new pressure on Iran has only been matched by the depth and breadth of misinformation and fake news being pumped out by the Iran lobby.

What is becoming clear though is that the central issue at the heart of the Trump administration’s complaints—that Iran’s ballistic missile program posed a serious international threat and its support of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah was destabilizing the Middle East—have finally gotten the attention of European leaders and serious traction throughout European capitals.

During the Obama administration’s negotiation of the nuclear deal, little emphasis was placed on Iran’s missile program, nor its abysmal human rights record or support for terrorism. That lack of negotiating prowess essentially left the Iranian regime off the hook and gave it carte blanche to rapidly build its missile program and gain strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Yemen through proxy wars.

Many EU leaders that had lauded the nuclear deal as paving the war towards Iranian moderation have been left in more precarious political situations as nearly four million Syrian refugees flooded into Europe in the greatest refugee crisis since World War II and cities such as Paris, Berlin and Brussels were rocked by terrorist acts inspired by the Islamic extremism espoused by the mullahs in Tehran.

That has forced many of them to make a decision to head off a potential move by the Trump administration to kill the nuclear deal and that is to apply more pressure on the Iranian regime on these issues they once considered unimportant.

One example has been French president Emmanuel Macron, who has taken a more public and aggressive stance towards Iranian military actions and human rights.

Macron told the Iranian regime’s Hassan Rouhani in a telephone call this weekend of his support for the nuclear accord and his concerns over Iran’s other activities according to the Financial Times.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, French foreign minister, is due to hold further talks in Tehran on Monday as the clock ticks towards a May deadline set by the US president for European countries to “fix” the nuclear agreement.

The EU and the bloc’s three signatories to the deal — France, Germany and Britain — are urgently trying to craft a solution that will placate the Trump administration’s without destroying an accord they argue is working.

Macron also asked for “clear responses” from Iran over “problems” outside the deal relating to its ballistic missile program and its destabilizing role in the region, particularly in Lebanon.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, will visit Tehran this week and call upon the regime to address the West’s misgivings about its ballistic missile program and Middle East military activities, according to Reuters.

The growing threats posed by the Iranian regime are now being scrutinized more openly as evidenced by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal authored by Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, and Stephen Harper, former prime minister of Canada, in which they both urged Europe to act more decisively in containing Iranian expansionism.

“Despite Tehran’s quest for regional control, popular protests in December and January showed that most of the nation’s citizens don’t share their leaders’ designs. The regime’s destabilizing actions have also triggered resistance from Saudi Arabia and other regional powers. Iran’s own citizens and neighbors are convinced of Tehran’s malice, and all concerned nations should heed their warning,” Aznar and Harper wrote.

“Thankfully, the U.S. has demonstrated its ability to rally its Middle Eastern partners in stabilizing the region. Iranian theocracy appeals mainly to a few neighboring Shiite Islamic factions, and Iran’s long-term conflicts with other sects have made many states eager to cooperate in restraining its influence. Numerous allies can be mobilized in the struggle against Iran, from the Kurds and tribal elements to many Sunni Arabs and Shiite forces not co-opted by Tehran. These factions must collaborate to contain Iran’s hegemonic ambitions,” they added.

They go on to warn that “if left unchecked, Iran’s aggression will ultimately threaten Europe and North America as well. All should urgently work together to counter this threat to global security.”

Their warnings should be heeded by the EU since the evidence has been so overwhelmingly against the claims of the Iran lobby and the Iranian regime.

The most serious threat facing the U.S. and in its allies is the high probability that Iran is quickly building permanent military bases in Syria and planning to move ballistic missiles there; placing most of Europe within range and providing almost no warning time for regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Israel any advance warning to detect, let alone shoot down, any Iranian missiles.

President Trump understood the geopolitical ramifications of the Iran nuclear deal better than anyone and now sees its potential certification as battering ram he can use to drive home the point of the threat Iranian regime missiles and its military poses to Europe.

It remains to be seen how many other European nations heed the wake up that French president Macron seems to be trumpeting more urgently now, but we hope they all take action soon.

Michael Tomlinson

NIAC Ignores the Bad News in FATF Decision on Iran Penalties

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NIAC Ignores the Bad News in FATF Decision on Iran Penalties

NIAC Ignores the Bad News in FATF Decision on Iran Penalties

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental body made up of 35 countries and two regional governing groups setting standards to promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures combating money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system.

The FATF monitors the progress of its members in implementing necessary measures, reviews money laundering and terrorist financing techniques and counter-measures and promotes the adoption and implementation of appropriate measures globally.

The FATF serves as a crucial watchdog then against the spread of global terrorism through the transfer of funds through the international banking system. Chief among its current assignments is to monitor North Korea and the Iranian regime.

As part of its monitoring of Iranian regime, the FATF provides periodic updates on the action plan the regime pledged to follow as part of the nuclear deal it signed two years ago. In its most recent update, the FATF noted that Iran’s action plan has expired with most items on its to-do list remaining incomplete.

Chief among the items still needing to be addressed by the regime are:

  1. Adequately criminalizing terrorist financing, including by removing the exemption for designated groups “attempting to end foreign occupation, colonialism and racism”;
  2. Identifying and freezing terrorist assets in line with the relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions;
  3. Ensuring an adequate and enforceable customer due diligence regime;
  4. Ensuring the full independence of the Financial Intelligence Unit and requiring the submission of STRs for attempted transactions;
  5. Demonstrating how authorities are identifying and sanctioning unlicensed money/value transfer service providers;
  6. Ratifying and implementing the Palermo and TF Conventions and clarifying the capability to provide mutual legal assistance;
  7. Ensuring that financial institutions verify that wire transfers contain complete originator and beneficiary information;
  8. Establishing a broader range of penalties for violations of the ML offense; and
  9. Ensuring adequate legislation and procedures to provide for confiscation of property of corresponding value.

If Iranian regime does not meet these obligations, the FATF has the power to impose counter-measures punishing the regime, including restricting its access to international currency exchanges and electronic transfers.

It was this kind of pressure that proved pivotal in bringing the mullahs to the bargaining table in the first place.

Although Iran has left most of the required action items unfilled, the FATF has opted to hold off pending the Iranian parliament taking up these measures in draft legislation. Their outcome remains uncertain as the regime has dropped suggestions it may walk away from the nuclear deal anyway, including statements made by Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

And yet, while the FATF continues to press the regime to comply with its promises, the National Iranian American Council didn’t miss the opportunity to crow that the FATF’s forbearance was in fact some kind of endorsement of the Iranian regime’s actions.

Predictably, the NIAC also called the FATF’s actions as standing up to pressure from the Trump administration.

“By showing itself unwilling to give in to pressure from the Trump administration and outside advocacy groups like United Against Nuclear Iran, which were pushing for the re-imposition of counter-measures against Iran, FATF smartly avoided politicization of its work and protected its integrity as a technical body assessing countries’ anti-money laundering and terrorist financing laws,” the NIAC statement read.

The NIAC said the Iranian regime had made “significant progress” in meeting the action plan, but neglected to note the disparity in how far the regime still has to go. For the NIAC, its only concern is to keep pushing the goal line back farther and farther to avoid crossing it and triggering new sanctions.

Its failure to recognize the agonizingly slow pace of approval of legislation by the Iranian parliament as part of a larger scheme to not make any changes in its financing of terror demonstrates the charade of the NIAC’s positions.

While the Trump administration has succeeded in focusing new pressure on Iran, Iran lobby groups such as the NIAC are now struggling to find any excuse to hold back the rising tide against its patrons in Tehran.

Laura Carnahan

The Biggest Lie About Syria and Middle East Stability

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The Biggest Lie About Syria and Middle East Stability

The Biggest Lie About Syria and Middle East Stability

On June 30, 2015, Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council and a staunch cheerleader for the Iranian regime, published an editorial on CNN’s website that in retrospect now looks otherworldly stupid.

In it, Parsi was making the case for the Iran nuclear deal and the benefits it would bring, not the least of which was the argument that it would help empower moderates in Iran, rally Iranian youth and bring about stability throughout the Middle East.

His exact words were:

“The deal will help unleash Iran’s vibrant, young (the median age is 28!) and moderate society, which is continuously pushing Iran in a democratic direction. The deal enjoys solid support among the Iranian public as well as among Iranian civil society leaders, partly because they believe the deal ‘would enable political and cultural reforms.’

“America benefits if the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people are increasingly met, because a more democratic Iran is a more moderate Iran.

“This is particularly important at a time when the violent winds of religious radicalism are ravaging the Middle East and beyond. America is in desperate need of an injection of political moderation in the region. An Iran that moves towards democracy could provide that,” Parsi wrote.

In the three years since he penned that fairy tale, the reality has been brutally and violently different than the rosy picture he painted:

  • Iran poured billions of dollars it received in economic sanctions relief into propping up the Assad regime in Syria and committing thousands of troops and material into expanding a civil war that claimed 400,000 lives and pushed out four million refugees;
  • Iran shifted billions away from its domestic economy to crash produce a ballistic missile program exempt from restrictions in the nuclear deal, threatening the region under a missile umbrella stretching 2,000 km and plunging the Iranian people into poverty;
  • In two parliamentary elections and a presidential race, the regime cracked down by arresting hundreds of journalists, dissidents, artists, bloggers, students and ethnic and religious minorities, as well as wiping off thousands of candidates in favor of preserving power within the hands of hardline religious candidates;
  • Iran has expanded wars in Iraq and Yemen using terrorist proxies funded and armed by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards and Quds Force, destabilizing the.

Parsi is either the dumbest political analyst on the planet or one so far committed to covering for the Iranian regime it’s a wonder he’s not drawing a salary from the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

Parsi has been so colossally wrong in his predictions we have to ask if any news organization ever runs a check on the accuracy of his quotes.

But picking apart Parsi’s past stumbles is only picking at the corners of a much broader tapestry; one in which the NIAC has been proven wrong over and over again in its predictions.

One of the more recent claims was by Ryan Costello, a NIAC policy fellow, who wrote in analysis running on the NIAC’s website on February 16, 2018, that the Iranian regime’s missile program was not a threat and pointed out it was limiting the range of its weapons to 2,000 km, which only placed most of the Middle East under threat of attack and not the whole world.

Small comfort when news has come out of satellite photos revealing a flurry of activity as Iran’s military begins construction of permanent military bases outside of Syria’s capital of Damascus complete with hangers capable of storing missiles that can now strike Israel, Saudi Arabia and most of the Mediterranean within a matter of minutes.

You hear that sound? It’s crickets in the silence coming from the NIAC.

According to Fox News, satellite images from ImageSat International show what is believed to be the new Iranian base operated by the Quds Force.  The photos show two new white hangars, each roughly 30 yards by 20 yards, used to store short- and medium-range missiles.

On Capitol Hill this week, the top U.S. military commander for American forces in the Middle East said Iran was “increasing” the number and “quality” of its ballistic missiles it was deploying to the region — when asked during a House Armed Services Committee hearing by Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., about reports Iran had moved more missiles into Syria.

Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, said Iran has “enhanced” its funding to proxy forces in the Middle East since the landmark nuclear agreement in July 2015, including sending missiles, fighters and other arms to Yemen and Syria.

The presence of permanent bases in Syria by Iran directly contradicts claims made by the NIAC that Iranian regime would only be a stabilizing force, but instead has turned into an occupation force.

All of which begets the question of what the U.S. needs to do to counter the regime, a question the NIAC has yet to answer other than to press the Trump administration not to ditch the nuclear agreement.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last month laid out a U.S. strategy in Syria that includes an indefinite stay for troops.

“U.S. disengagement from Syria would provide Iran the opportunity to further strengthen its position in Syria,” Tillerson said in the January speech. “As we have seen from Iran’s proxy wars and public announcements, Iran seeks dominance in the Middle East and the destruction of our ally.”

The tragedy of all this is that the NIAC has contributed to the biggest lie about Syria over the past three years and so far no one except us and the Iranian dissident movement seems to be holding it accountable for it.

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