Quds force – Iran Lobby

Iran Regime Hands Military Over to Extremist While Seeking Cash

In an unexpected development late last month, the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei announced the promotion of Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri as chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. A shadowy figure from the country’s vaunted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Bagheri has been tasked with overseeing all branches of Iranian regime’s armed forces, including the IRGC, the regular military (Artesh), and the police.

Bagheri has an extensive military background, including serving as the IRGC’s chief of intelligence and information operations, which has put him at the forefront of coordinating the regime’s work with terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, as well as maintaining the network of proxies throughout the region including Shiite militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Importantly according to a piece in the National Interest, Bagheri belongs to a clique of IRGC officers who form the organization’s core leadership, sitting alongside the likes of Mohammad Ali Jafari, the current commander of the IRGC, and Qassem Soleimani, the famed general directing the IRGC’s expeditionary wing, the Quds Force.

Composed of just a few members, this clique shares deep ties dating back to the Iran-Iraq War, and is hugely influential in shaping the organization’s trajectory. Neither is it averse to intervening in domestic politics: members of this clique, including Mohammad Bagheri, signed a letter in 1999 to then president of the mullah’s regime, Mohammad Khatami, threatening a military coup if Khatami did not crush a growing student rebellion. Notably, Rouhani the current “reformist” president was the Iranian regime’s National Security Advisor at the time and was at the forefront of suppressing the student movement.

This appointment is not some simple bureaucratic reshuffling. It represents a significant change in regime policy to put the nation’s military and police services firmly in the hands of the IRGC and away from the regular army. It places the most politicized unit of the military, which already controls wide swathes of Iran’s economy, at the top of the pyramid in terms of raw power.

The sharp end of Iran’s interventions in the Middle East has been the IRGC, which to date has lost hundreds of fighters and tens of commanders across the region. In Iraq, the IRGC has overseen the establishment of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization spanning hundreds of predominantly Shia militias that fights alongside Iraq’s regular military and often commands its own operations.

The IRGC provides training, weapons and frontline commanders to assist the PMF, which is dominated by militias that have pledged personal fealty to Iran’s supreme leader and not the nation as a whole; an important distinction.

The moves includes the outlining of a modernization plan by Bagheri to upgrade the Islamic state’s military which has already begun with an expensive shopping list of Russian military hardware, including new fighter jets, anti-ship missiles and advanced anti-aircraft batteries.

The costs of that upgrade may also explain why the regime has been complaining loudly of the lack of access to U.S. currency exchanges and the reluctance of foreign banks to handle Iranian transactions due to the continued threat of economic sanctions put in place by the U.S. over human rights violations and support of terrorism and not tied to last year’s nuclear agreement.

The fact that the regime has opted to use the unfrozen funds it has access to as part of the nuclear agreement to help fund its proxy wars and not to help spur the Iranian economy says loads about the intentions of Khamenei and the other ruling mullahs.

Instead, the regime has sought to place blame on the still anemic economy on the U.S. and the inability to get fresh cash. This has helped whip the Iran lobby into a lather writing editorials calling the cash crunch a “new sanction” and a threat to the nuclear agreement, which is silly when we consider the agreement has been a failure in stemming the regime’s nuclear and regional ambitions.

One example has been the near constant drumbeat of posts on regime loyalist blog Lobelog.com which put out a Q&A with noted regime supporter retired Amb. Peter Jenkins of the British Diplomatic Service, who blamed the Obama administration for doing nothing to help Iran access its financial windfall.

He also raised the issue of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s past support for some of the toughest sanctions ever placed on Iran and whether or not she would continue on that path if elected.

“I am concerned by Ms Clinton’s uncritical liking for the current Prime Minister of Israel and his right-wing government. I am also concerned by the hawkish nature of her record on foreign policy issues, and I am unsure that she will feel any inclination, still less obligation to protect the legacy of President Obama, from some of whose policies she has sought to distance herself,” Jenkins said.

The realization is probably growing on the mullahs that no matter who gets elected in November, the U.S. policy of appeasing the regime may be coming to an end which is spurring their frantic efforts to unlock the billions in cash they so desperately need.

It is a point former president Bill Clinton reinforced in his speech during Tuesday’s nomination of his wife at the Democratic National Convention, where he emphasized her role as Secretary of State in getting the toughest sanctions placed on Iran during her tenure.

“As secretary of state, (Hillary Clinton) worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program” and “got Russia and China to support them,” Bill Clinton said.

We can only hope as president, should she prevail, she continue on that same path.

By Michale Tomlinson

Reasons To Be Thankful This Past Weekend

This past weekend, across the U.S., families sat down together to celebrate family and give thanks for all what they have, including secularism in government, freedom of speech and the practice of religion, support for the rights of women and minorities, protection for a free and active press and the guarantee of due process and a presumption of innocence in criminal cases.

All those things and more have formed the bedrock of American civil society for 239 years, but are virtually non-existent in the one country that has steadily called for the destruction of the American way of life since 1979: the Iranian regime.

The past few months of 2015 have certainly caused significant concern and alarm among Americans and throughout most parts of the world. We have seen terror attacks spring up literally around the world, most recently in the horrific attacks in Paris – first with the Charlie Hebdo attacks and then the bombings – and in the wave of atrocities perpetuated by Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and Shiite militias.

Couple that with the spread of sectarian conflicts – most fueled by the Iranian regime – in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and you begin to get a pretty good idea of how chaotic the year has become in spite of the promises made by the Iran lobby that things would settle down after a deal was struck with the mullahs in Tehran over a new nuclear deal.

How wrong people like Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council were.

But for most Americans, their Thanksgiving wishes and victories were much smaller and personal. For them, most Americans could be thankful that this past weekend:

No more Americans were arrested and held hostage in Iran, except for the five currently held captive by the Iranian regime;
No new terror attacks were launched against Americans at home or abroad; and
The Iranian regime didn’t launch any new ballistic missiles like it did last month violating United Nations arms embargoes.

But for the Iranian regime, this past weekend wasn’t nearly a peaceful or good one for the mullahs as setbacks continue to dog the regime and stymie each of its efforts to expand its vision for a greater Islamic sphere of influence controlled from Tehran.

Among the news coming from media sources this weekend include:

Reports that Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was seriously injured in Syria while supervising Iranian regime forces fighting rebels on behalf of the Assad regime. This follows previous news of deaths of other top Iranian military commanders in Syria;
The Washington Post reported that findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency can be expected to spark another round of intense scrutiny over the Iran regime’s claims its previously undisclosed nuclear program did not have any military components to it;
In anticipation of the IAEA report, the regime denounced the ongoing investigation and warned that Iran would not follow through on the nuclear deal unless the IAEA closed its investigation no later than Dec. 15;
Kenyan security forces have arrested two Kenyan men with links to the Iranian regime’s Quds Forces on suspicion of planning attacks in the East African nation, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday. It said their targets included “hotels in Nairobi frequented by Western tourists and diplomats;”
A flurry of reports in the Iran regime’s official and semiofficial news outlets that have flooded out about more combat deaths suffered by Iranian forces in Syria have surprised analysts who monitor the country’s tightly controlled media. The reports, they say, indicate that at least 67 Iranians have been killed in Syria since the beginning of October, in a move some have described as an attempt by the mullahs to grab headlines back from Russia in an effort to burnish the image of regime forces fighting in Syria.

And to top off the weekend, top mullah Ali Khamenei went on his usual Sunday rant denouncing the U.S. and promising to keep the regime’s policies aimed squarely at preserving the Islamic revolution and spreading it throughout the region.

As reported in the Washington Times, Khamenei’s message was the subject of an analysis in a report by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“To encourage perpetual revolution might mean to foment continuous crisis,” the report said. “This, in turn, suggests greater regional instability and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps provocations toward U.S. forces and others.”

In other words, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal on which the Obama administration gambled for a more moderate Iran, has not tempered Khamenei’s fiery outcry.

“Khamenei’s endorsement of an expansive and perhaps even growing IRGC role confirms the group’s position as the chief obstacle to any political and economic reform in the Islamic Republic, and also suggests that the IRGC may win disproportionate advantage from any unfrozen assets or foreign direct investment entering the Iranian economy,” the report added.

All of which points out that while Americans celebrated values of family, peace, forgiveness and charity on Thanksgiving, the Iranian regime was busy deepening a conflict that has displaced half of Syria’s population, creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the end of World War II and spreading a radicalized form of extremist Islam manifesting itself in various terrorist groups around the world.

We can only hope the mullahs don’t get their holiday wishes granted next month.

By Michael Tomlinson