Iran Lobby

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

Iranian Leader Again Threatens to Cut Off Oil Chokepoint

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Iranian Leader Again Threatens to Cut Off Oil Chokepoint

There are several predictable things about the Iranian regime. For one, it will always hold marches where protestors will chant “Death to America.” For another, it will support terrorist activities against its neighbors and its perceived enemies in far-flung countries.

It will also have its leaders make slightly irrational and not-so-veiled threats against any number of countries, militaries, economies, landmarks – or most recently – navigable waterways.

The latest episode was Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s threat this week that the Iranian regime would disrupt other countries’ oil shipments through the Persian Gulf if the U.S. moved forward with efforts to stop Iranian oil exports as part of its renewed economic sanctions.

“America should know that we are selling our oil and will continue to sell our oil and they are not able to stop our oil exports,” Rouhani said in a televised speech during a trip to the northern Iranian city of Shahroud.

“If one day they want to prevent the export of Iran’s oil, then no oil will be exported from the Persian Gulf,” Rouhani, the supposedly moderate President of the Iranian regime said.

The fact that Rouhani made nearly identical threats in last July should come as no surprise as the regime is long on rhetoric, but short on action on this scale.

His comments were backed up by similar bellicose statements from the Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose commander was quoted as saying Tehran would block oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. went ahead and banned its oil sales.

The concept of a blockade of the Gulf, while appealing to the more irrational members of the mullahs running Iran, would only help topple their rule since any effort to force a blockade would almost assuredly have the opposite effect and unite countries around the world in forcing open the shipping lanes no matter the cost.

The threat comes less than 24 hours after U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that an aircraft carrier group led by the USS John C. Stennis is set to arrive in the Persian Gulf “within days” — which will bring a close what’s been described as the longest period in two decades that a carrier group was absent from the region. Specifically, the unnamed officials identified the purpose as to “exhibit a show of force against Iran”.

The carrier deployment, though previously scheduled, was announced after the U.S. condemned Iran’s test firing a medium-range nuclear capable ballistic missile on Sunday.

It would also reinforce the perception that Tehran was never really serious about moderation when it entered into the nuclear deal and instead only wants to continue disrupting the world stage.

The threat of a blockade is about as serious as the claims by the mullahs that no dissension exists within the Islamic state, despite mounting protests throughout the country.

Even the carefully pushed narrative by the Iran lobby that Europe would come to Iran’s rescue with an alternative financing mechanism designed to help pay for Iranian oil sales in alternative forms of payment got a dose of cold water and had to be refuted by its foreign minister.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif denied a Reuters report that said a European mechanism to set up an account to trade with Iran and beat the newly re-imposed U.S. sanctions may not cover oil sales, the Iranian foreign ministry website reported.

“Based on the information we have, it’s not so. Because if Iran’s oil money is not deposited into the account, it’s not clear that there would be any funds for trade, because oil is a major part of Iran’s exports,” Zarif said, according to the website.

“This appears to be propaganda aimed at discouraging people,” Zarif added.

While the Iranian regime had pinned hopes that the effort led by France and Germany would yield dividends, the ill-advised efforts by the regime to assassinate Iranian dissidents in France and Denmark led to renewed calls to punish the regime.

Talk about bad timing. The mullahs seem to excel at it; continually undercutting the messaging by the Iran lobby with idiotic actions.

This contradiction in messages is borne out by a new study by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) which revealed a dramatic increase in the regime’s defense spending; far beyond what would be perceived as necessary for its defense.

One key finding was that the 2018–19 defense budget bill is much higher than what even the most ardent critics within the Iranian establishment had sought. These hardliners wanted five percent of the country’s total budgetary outlay for defense, which was already achieved in 2016.

Iran’s military expenditure for 2018–19 is estimated at $19.6 billion out of $260 billion total outlay, which makes defense spending at 7.5 per cent of Iran’s total budget.

Most interesting though was the finding by IISS that the latest Iranian defense budget also had a whopping 84 percent rise in allocations for local forces pointing to rising internal dissent and the need to shift more resources to putting down protests and tracking down dissidents.

So while Rouhani may be blustering about closing the Gulf, the real threat to Iran and its mullahs is not coming from the Straits of Hormuz, but the streets of Tehran.

Michael Tomlinson

Death Spiral of Iran Rial Spells Disaster for Mullahs

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Death Spiral of Iran Rial Spells Disaster for Mullahs

Death Spiral of Iran Rial Spells Disaster for Mullahs

The Iranian regime’s currency, the rial, plunged to a new record low this weekend, dropping past 112,000 rials to a single U.S. dollar. The stunning drop comes on the eve of the re-imposition of harsh economic sanctions by the Trump administration following the decertification of Iran nuclear agreement because of the regime’s continued support of terrorism, development of ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and abysmal human rights record.

The first lot of sanctions go into effect on August 7th, while more severe sanctions, including the halt of imports of Iranian oil, go into effect on November 4th. Failure to do so will bring U.S. financial measures that have already caused a flurry of cancellations of contracts by Asian and European companies worried about them; further crippling the Iranian regime.

The weekend alone saw a drop from 97,500 rials on Saturday to the 112,000 level on Sunday, a one-day plunge of 12.5 percent, according to foreign exchange website Bonbast.com. Other websites said the dollar was exchanged between 108,500 and 116,000 rials, according to Reuters.

The last time the rial experienced a similar death spiral in value was September 2012. The spread between the official trading value set by the mullahs and the black market is a stunning 154 percent. While that may appear to be devastating news for Iran’s ruling regime, the dirty secret is that for anyone holding vast sums of U.S. currency, such as the ruling mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, they could handsomely profit enormous sums in the blink of an eye, according to an editorial by Steve H. Hanke of John Hopkins University in Forbes.

So, while ordinary Iranians are caught in a financial squeeze, the regime’s leadership and military could weather the short-term chaos personally. The question is whether long-suffering rank-and-file Iranians will push for democratic reforms and eventual regime change?

The other half of the financial picture of the dying rial is spiraling inflation which has grown increasingly ugly. According to Hanke, Iran’s implied annual inflation rate has surged to 203 percent; almost twenty times higher than the official inflation rate of 10.2 percent.

Hanke goes on to give an example of how Bulgaria’s implementation of a currency board helped arrest hyperinflation and put that country back on the road to fiscal health.

It’s a nice thought, but it would never work for Iran because, unlike Bulgaria, the Iranian regime is:

  • Deeply corrupt with graft and skimming taking place throughout the economy by the ruling mullahs, their families and state-owned industries such as petroleum, banking, and telecommunications which supports the military;
  • Heavily involved in funding proxy wars in Syria and Yemen, as well as terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah with massive amounts of cash, especially to prop up the Assad-regime in Syria;
  • Unable to exercise any fiscal discipline when its monetary commitments to its foreign and military initiatives drain it of badly needed foreign currency such as buying expensive weapon systems from Russia and China.

The dilemma facing the mullahs over its dying currency and the looming American sanctions has forced the mullahs to verbally attack the U.S. but offer little else in the way of real resistance in the face of what is sure to be punishing sanctions.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif weighed in by claiming that Iran would survive any U.S. sanctions.

“We have enough power to show the United States that it should abandon this addiction. We believe that the world has come to the conclusion that the United States should overcome its dependence on sanctions,” Zarif was quoted as saying by Iran’s ISNA news agency.

He all but begged the European Union to intervene and act in the interests of its member-states and stop blindly following the policy of President Trump, but the issue is not whether or not the mullahs will endure sanctions since they have already literally ripped off the people of Iran in stockpiling their wealth.

No, the real question is at what point do the Iranian people say enough is enough and seek real democratic reforms, such as allowing the creation of truly independent political parties that can run for parliamentary and presidential campaigns.

Things are so bad in Iran that the regime is preparing to launch its own cryptocurrency to circumvent the decline in the rial.

Alireza Daliri, of Iran’s Directorate of Deputy of Management and Investment Affairs, said several domestic companies are developing a digital currency and will launch it after fixing several persistent flaws. He added the unnamed companies were working in coordination with the Central Bank of Iran.

Alireza told ISNA news agency they were trying to prepare the grounds to use the virtual currency in the country. He further stated that the digital currency would help the country to transfer money anywhere around the world and would also help the nation during the U.S sanctions.

Another piece of fiction being foisted by the regime since crackdowns on global cryptocurrencies by several nations have been effective in combatting their use by narcotics cartels and criminal syndicates.

Iran itself banned the instant messaging app Telegram because of the success of the initial offering of its own cryptocurrency which Iranians were hungry for since it was not tied to the rial.

In another sign of its desperation, the Iranian regime announced plans to offer price and tax incentives to private investors to take over idled state projects to help boost the economy. Most of these projects were originally managed and financed by foreign companies in the wake of the nuclear deal’s signing in 2015, but now have fled Iran with the looming sanctions.

The plan will offer attractive prices and flexible terms as well as tax holidays for investors who agree to take over some of the 76,000 government projects which are unfinished or idle, Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri said on state television.

“Over the past few months, the country’s liquidity has gone into housing, foreign exchange, and gold coins, raising prices and provoking public concerns,” Jahangiri was quoted as saying by the website of the state broadcaster.

The admission by the regime that its economy was headed for a disaster was more proof that the mullahs were reaching the end of the line in trying to keep the sinking ship of state afloat.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Grows More Desperate

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Iran Regime Grows More Desperate

Iran Regime Grows More Desperate

It’s no secret the mullahs controlling the Iranian regime despise any form of dissent, especially anything that could be construed as homegrown. While the mullahs try to brush off criticism from the international community, it’s harder to turn a blind eye when their fellow Iranians are the ones leading the protests.

A proverbial thorn in their side has been the Iranian diaspora made up of exiled and expatriate Iranians living around the world. Many were initially stranded outside of Iran when the Islamic revolution swept through Iran, while others have fled the regime’s extremism over the years.

That diaspora consists of nearly five million Iranians living abroad and large numbers of them actively participate in a variety of human rights and dissident groups dedicated to improving conditions within Iran or peacefully working for regime change or at least better human rights and religious freedoms.

One of the largest and longest active dissident groups has been the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) which has earned him top honors on the mullahs’ hit list of most wanted. It has received special attention from the regime, including its infamous Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) which has waged a decades-long campaign aimed at disinformation, slander and even organizing attacks against MEK members.

Those past attacks have included strikes against refugee camps for Iranians who fled Iran, many of them MEK members. The Iranian regime, working with Shiite militia allies in Iraq, staged frequent attacks at these camps where the residents were unarmed, slaughtering scores of them.

The MEK has continued to be a sore point for the regime by uncovering all sorts of secrets in Iran, including the clandestine nuclear program that soon became the focal point of international sanctions.

The dissident group has also provided one of the few reliable channels to the outside world of what is going on inside the closed of Islamic state, including photos, videos, and testimonials of public executions, abuse of women and mistreatment of ethnic and religious minorities.

The regime has not been able to shake these dissident groups off of itself no matter how hard it tries to kill off its detractors, but most of these efforts have been focused on attacks in distant places, cyberspace and in the arena of public opinion.

Recently the Iranian regime sanctioned what may be its most brazen effort yet in planning to bomb an annual gathering of Iranian dissident groups including the MEK a massive rally outside of Paris with scores of distinguished luminaries in attendance, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who now serves as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney.

Assadollah Assadi, a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat, was suspected of contracting a couple in Belgium to attack the according to German federal prosecutors.

He allegedly gave the Antwerp-based couple a device containing 500 grams of the explosive TATP during a meeting in Luxembourg in late June, prosecutors said in a written statement.

Assadi was detained earlier this month near the German city of Aschaffenburg on a European warrant after the couple with Iranian roots was stopped in Belgium and authorities reported finding powerful explosives in their car.

In their statement, German prosecutors allege that Assadi, who has been registered as a diplomat at the Iranian Embassy in Vienna since 2014, was a member of MOIS, whose tasks “primarily include the intensive observation and combatting of opposition groups inside and outside of Iran.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran of using its embassies to plot extremist attacks in Europe and warned Tehran that its actions have “a real high cost” after it threatened to disrupt Mideast oil supplies.

“Just this past week there were Iranians arrested in Europe who were preparing to conduct a terror plot in Paris, France. We have seen this malign behavior in Europe,” Pompeo said in an interview with Sky News Arabia.

The extent of the bomb plot and the potential to kill and maim so many non-Iranian dignitaries and journalists attending the gathering demonstrates how desperate the regime has grown as it faces unrelenting pressures at home and abroad with massive protests and demonstrations over a spiraling economy and renewed economic sanctions by the Trump administration.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, an Iranian dissident umbrella group that sponsored the Paris gathering, quoted its intelligence sources inside the country as saying that Iran’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei, and President Hassan Rouhani approved the bombing plan.

“In Belgium, it is more probable that Assadi will face justice and has to answer all sorts of questions and does not have any diplomatic immunity,” said Shahin Gobadi, a MEK spokesman.

The MEK intelligence report said the Paris attack was approved months ago by every lever of Iranian power, from the supreme leader to the foreign and intelligence ministries to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The report said Assadi’s cover was as a counselor. In fact, he is the MOIS station chief in Vienna and the ministry’s coordinator for other stations in Europe.

“His main task was espionage and conspiracy against the [MEK], and he has been traveling to various European countries in this regard,” the report said.

The level of hubris it takes for the Iranian regime to stage an attack on French soil at an event with a global television audience makes it a worthy parent to terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

It may be high time for the mullahs to pay a heavy price for sanctioning such an act of terror.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Regime Teeters on the Brink of Change

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A scene of Iranian protesters near Grand Bazar Tehran

Iranian protesters gather at Mobile market in Tehran on June 25, 2018.
Protesters in Tehran shouted slogans and threw rocks in the streets on June 25, before being dispersed by anti-riot policemen. / AFP PHOTO / ATTA KENAREATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

In it, Shakespeare’s tragic villain, the ugly hunchback Richard schemes to depose his brother from the throne of England and steal it for himself after slaying the child heirs—his nephews. He eventually meets his fate, dying at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s classic mirrors the ascension of the mullahs in Tehran who stole the revolution in 1979 that deposed the Shah of Iran only to turn it into a tyrannical Islamic theocracy that has regularly imprisoned, abused, tortured and hanged its own people including men, women and children.

It is only fitting today we may be witnessing the third and final act for the Iranian regime as it is rocked with an ever-increasing tempo of mass protests that have swamped the country and put the mullahs and military allies in the Revolutionary Guard Corps on the defensive.

The popular protests started spontaneously last winter and were rooted in economic woes being experienced by ordinary Iranians, including much of the poor in the more remote provinces outside of Tehran including farmers, coal miners, and other workers.

Unlike the protests in the wake of the disputed presidential elections of 2009 which were largely centered in Tehran and were powered by middle class and educated Iranians, these protests have swollen to include broad cross-sections of Iranian society.

The most recent protests have engulfed the Grand Bazaar in Tehran and reflect the despair and frustration of Iranian business owners and merchants over the virtual free fall in the Rial against the dollar, which hit an all-time low of 90,000 Rial for a single U.S. dollar.

The financial fallout is so bad, the mullahs have sought to halt trading in dollars and banned the import of 1,300 foreign goods such as household appliances and consumer technology products.

Additionally, the decision by the Trump administration to not re-certify the Iran nuclear deal and effectively end it brought on the reinstatement of economic sanctions that has crippled the Iranian economy that feeds its military adventures in Syria and Yemen.

The Trump administration’s focus on stiffening those sanctions have resulted in a cascade of business deals being canceled culminating in a warning from the U.S. State Department that companies currently buying Iranian crude oil must completely cut those exports by November this year or face sanctions.

The administration does not expect to grant any waivers to companies that purchase Iranian oil or invest in its energy industry, a State Department official said, putting these companies in a precarious position should they choose to continue doing business with the Iranian regime.

Things have gotten so bad that a senior Revolutionary Guard Corps commander went on television to tell all Iranians they were duty-bound to help the regime overcome its economic problems.

“It is our duty to work in coordination and synergy to help the government and other branches overcome economic woes and foil enemy plots for an economic war and psychological warfare,” said Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, a military adviser to top mullah Ali Khamenei.

The regime sought to blame the economic woes on outside forces such as the U.S., even though protestors such as those taking over the Grand Bazaar, have increasingly and loudly denounced the regime’s foreign military ventures such as the Syrian civil war which has drained the Islamic state’s coffers dry.

For Hassan Rouhani, the prospects look even bleaker as Khamenei weighs whether or not to sacrifice his puppet in order to satisfy calls for reform.

For Rouhani’s part, he dutifully sent France, Germany and Britain letters with a list of demands calling it the price that needs to be paid in order for Iran to stay in the nuclear deal in a Hail Mary effort to keep an economic lifeline open.

While the contents were not made public, we can easily assume Rouhani was demanding these countries keep their commitments for EU companies to continue fulfilling business deals, as well as continue buying Iranian oil. Without these lifelines, the collapse of the regime could be counted in months.

One example of those collapsing deals was the decision by French-Italian regional aircraft manufacturer ATR to halt delivery of its turboprop passenger aircraft Iran ordered in the wake of the nuclear deal.

IranAir, the regime’s national flag carrier, contracted to buy 20 planes from ATR and eight have been delivered with the remaining dozen now in limbo.

Large commercial manufacturers Boeing and Airbus also announced halts in delivering airliners ordered by the regime which has used its commercial air fleet, such as Mahan Air, to ferry troops, ammunition and weapons to Syria to help support the Assad regime during its bloody civil war.

Things have gotten so desperate for the regime that government spokesman, Mohammad Baqer Nobakht, called on diaspora Iranians to “bring their money to Iran” and urged all Iranians to invest their cash and gold into the economy.

Of course, he neglected to mention the practice of arrested and imprisoning dual-national Iranians coming back to visit relatives which increased dramatically following the nuclear deal.

The International Monetary Fund reported that a record amount of capital, $27 billion, was taken out of the country last year. Khamenei, in a sermon recently celebrating the end of Ramadan, called upon Iranians to stop taking leisure trips abroad, to make sure no more foreign exchange leaves Iran, according to the New York Times.

In comments following on his boss’, Rouhani promised his government would cut spending, reduce international travel and fly economy class to ease the burden on the public. He also said his government would import raw materials at affordable prices to help domestic manufacturers and ensure supply for Iranians.

Additionally, he urged ministries to issue government bonds to give people alternatives to the dollar and the euro for investing their assets.

“If anyone thinks the government will resign or step aside, or go, they are mistaken,” Rouhani said.

The clock is ticking on the Iranian regime and the mullahs.

Michael Tomlinson

Jamal Abdi Responds to Mike Pompeo with Absurdities

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Jamal Abdi Responds to Mike Pompeo with Absurdities

Jamal Abdi Responds to Mike Pompeo with Absurdities

In a landmark speech to the Heritage Foundation, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out the Trump administration’s new policy towards the Iranian regime including a list of a dozen conditions the mullahs would need to address to move forward with the U.S. in a new relationship.

Chief among those conditions was a new requirement that the Iranian regime would have to stop enriching all uranium and supporting militant groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthi; conditions that the Obama administration had tossed aside in its haste to nail down a nuclear deal with almost no pre-conditions.

In exchange for accepting these new conditions, Pompeo laid out the U.S. would lift punishing economic sanctions, restore diplomatic relations, open up commercial activity and give Iran access to advanced technology it badly needs to revitalize its economy and infrastructure.

The policy as laid out by Pompeo essentially resets the clock to the period before the Iran nuclear negotiations ran off the rails when crushing and comprehensive economic sanctions from countries around the world had dragged the Iranian regime kicking and screaming to the bargaining table where the Obama administration promptly gave away the proverbial house.

If this was a game of high stakes poker, the Obama team folded even before the flop, paying the price of the ante, but never seeing the hole cards.

Of course, the idea of a new, revised agreement that finally corralled the regime’s worst instincts was greeted with skepticism by European leaders.

Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, said the U.S. decision to fold all of its disputes with Tehran into a “jumbo Iran treaty” would be very difficult to achieve “in anything like a reasonable timetable,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, insisted the Iran agreement President Trump had abandoned remained the best way to contain Tehran’s nuclear efforts and said the EU would support it as long as Iran did. “The deal belongs to the international community,” she said.

But the new policy articulated by Pompeo is a clear demonstration of what should have been on the table in the original negotiations back in 2015. If the U.S. had exercised its leverage at that crucial moment, the devastating wars in Syria and Yemen may have never taken place.

Predictably the National Iranian American Council led the braying chorus of naysayers attacking Pompeo’s speech and leading the charge was Jamal Abdi, recently anointed as the new president for NIAC.

“The Trump Administration is setting the stage for a war of choice with Iran, with Mike Pompeo offering a smokescreen of diplomacy to distract from the administration’s pursuit of Iraq-style regime change,” Abdi said in a statement released by NIAC.

“Trump is renting out U.S. Middle East policy to the highest bidder – in this case Saudi Arabia, the GCC states, and Israel – and expecting ordinary Americans and U.S. service members to shoulder the burden of a regional escalation, a potential trade war with our allies, and a new Iraq-style regime change war in the Middle East.”

Abdi may be replacing Trita Parsi, but the rhetoric and misstatements are still the same. NIAC once again trots out the war fears in a false flag effort to convince Americans that the president wants to wage war against Iran; forgetting that then-candidate Trump was the one of the first on the campaign trail to criticize the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and has been reluctant to commit U.S. combat troops to any new escalation, especially during the bloody Syria civil war.

Abdi of course neglects to mention that Iranian regime was responsible for the escalation that killed over 400,000 people in Syria, when it shipped Hezbollah fighters, then its own Revolutionary Guards to fight there.

Abdi doles out the same tropes the Iran lobby has used before, but now they ring hollow with the benefit of hindsight. The three years since the deal have shown how an unrestrained Iran has radically reshaped the Middle East and resulted in deaths from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and the essential failure of the promises made by NIAC and the Iran lobby: the nuclear deal did not moderate the Iranian regime but unleashed it.

Now that Iran’s economy is reeling from corruption, mismanagement and diversion of billions of dollars to its military and terrorism, the mullahs in Tehran are under enormous pressure from mass protests across the country since last December, which is why the Trump administration views this as an opportunity to reset the situation and bring about a more comprehensive deal.

In his own unconventional style, President Trump sees an opportunity here to correct what the previous administration fumbled and the Iran lobby has been rendered largely impotent in trying to stop him.

Laura Carnahan

The Rank Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby on Syria

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The Rank Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby on Syria

The Rank Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby on Syria

Bashar al-Assad rules Syria with the same kind of tyrannical tactics common in Iran under the rule of his mullah partners. That includes the use of chemical weapons to target and kill pockets of resistance to his rule; the most recent strike coming recently and claiming the lives of men, women, and children in grisly scenes broadcast around the world.

The repeated use of such weapons resulted in a coordinated strike by the military forces of the U.S., Great Britain and France against three sites identified as having been storage or development sites for Assad’s chemical weapons this past weekend.

The strikes themselves were hardly a surprise given the level of revulsion around the world to Assad’s continued use of chemical weapons and the tweeting by President Donald Trump of his open intention to punish the rogue regime.

What was interesting was his televised address once the attacks began of his putting the Iranian regime and Russia on notice for their continued support of the Assad regime.

“What kind of a nation wants to be associated with the mass murder of innocent men, women, and children?” the president said.

President Trump asks an important question and really the only one that matters for the future of Syria and the Middle East.

Under his predecessor’s administration, the U.S. engaged in a foreign policy based largely on appeasing regional bad actors like the Iranian regime in an effort to coax them to adhere to dubious international agreements. That policy led to agreements that essentially exempted Iran from militant actions that only exacerbated and inflamed regional conflict.

Those policies gave us the quagmire President Trump now faces where there are hardly any good choices. The decision to strike militarily was not taken lightly and it says much for the sake of future diplomacy when the U.S. was joined by British and French military forces in a united show of force.

Take into consideration the positive alignments by the Arab world led by Saudi Arabia in confronting Iranian regime’s aggression and we see a world moving towards to the kind of unified front that helped bring the Iranian regime to the bargaining table in the first place with crushing economic sanctions before the Obama administration let the regime off the hook.

“We renew our strong condemnation of terrorist acts carried out by Iran in the Arab region, and we reject its blatant interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries,” Saudi King Salman said at a summit of Arab leaders, without referencing Friday’s missile strikes on Syria, according to Reuters.

Riyadh expressed its support for the strikes on Damascus in a statement on Saturday.

“We fully support military operations against military targets in Syria,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said. “The military operation was necessary to protect civilians and stop chemical use.”

But for the Trump administration, the strike was more than just eradicating chemical stockpiles—stockpiles that the Russians had promised were removed under their supervision in a deal with the Obama administration—but rather about a broader agenda that includes containing the Iranian regime.

In an interview with ABC News, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the U.S. had three objectives in Syria: Defeating ISIS, containing Iran and ending the use of chemical weapons.

Which makes the reaction by the Iran lobby, specifically the National Iranian American Council, all the more appalling.

In a statement released by the NIAC, research director Reza Marashi said:

“The situation in Syria is tremendously dangerous, and President Trump risks throwing fuel on the regional fire. Given that Iranian and Russian forces are closely embedded with the Syrian government, there is a significant risk that any strikes will trigger retaliation and a bloodier, wider war with few discernible ways to de-escalate the conflict.”

We cannot believe Marashi was educated in a home for mentally deficit children growing up, but he must assume the world’s journalists are idiots when he calls for deflecting attacks on Syria because Russian and Iranian forces are deeply embedded there since it was the Iranian regime and Russia that have been supporting Assad and enabling his use of chemical weapons in the first place!

Wouldn’t it have been more responsible for Marashi and NIAC to denounce Assad’s use of chemical weapons and urge Iran and Russia to use their influence on Assad to de-escalate the conflict and garner a promise from him not to gas his own people anymore?

Instead Marashi ends the paltry statement by calling U.S. action “reckless” but only citing a “duty” by Iran and Russia to rein in Assad. Hardly a denunciation of the use of vile weapons.

“A large part of the reason that Syria is in ruins today is because nearly all actors have pursued military solutions instead of diplomacy aimed at halting the bloodshed. An eye for an eye approach will not bring justice or peace to Syria, and there is no moral high ground for those who respond to abhorrent violence with more violence,” Marashi also writes.

The irony of Marashi calling out the lack of diplomatic actions when the Iranian regime ignored diplomatic efforts to stop the Syrian civil war when it started and instead poured billions of dollars to prop up Assad, mobilized tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, shipped in Iranian-backed Shiite militias from Iraq, recruited Afghan mercenaries and started an airlift of ammunition and supplies using its own regional airlines is appalling to any rational observer.

The Iranian regime has been the guilty in ignoring diplomacy and using sheer military might to hold Syria together for Assad. Remember, it was the Iranian regime that sent its notorious Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, on a secret trip to Moscow to beg for Russian intervention in July 2015 to save Assad and Iranian forces from defeat.

Marashi’s statement only proves once again how the NIAC and rest of Iran lobby are still working to spread the kind of fake news that helped the Iranian regime avoid crippling sanctions in the first place, freeing the regime to support Assad and allow these chemical attacks to take place in the first place.

All of which begs the question: Why does the NIAC support the slaughter of men, women, and children with poison gas?

Michael Tomlinson

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

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

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