Iran Lobby

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

After Syria Strike Next Move Should be Pushing Iran Out

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After Syria Strike Next Move Should be Pushing Iran Out

After Syria Strike Next Move Should be Pushing Iran Out

You can almost pinpoint to the day when things turned really bad in Syria. For much of the fall and spring of 2012-2013, the Assad regime was on the ropes from a series of victories by rebel forces including the loss of a key airbase and provincial capital.

The Syrian army suffered from several publicized defections of key leaders and the rebel coalition had grown significantly around moderate groups backed by the U.S.

Then in April of 2013, the Iranian regime directed its terrorist proxy Hezbollah to join in the fray, along with advisors and commanders from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Coupled with a massive influx of cash and weapons, the restocked Syrian army launched a series of counteroffensives that began to turn the tide.

Up until that point, the rebels had pushed to within eyesight of Damascus and Assad was frantically figuring out where his exile should take place.

For the mullahs in Tehran, it was an equally scary time as its major Shia partner was about to fall.

But with the reinforcements and direct intervention by Iran, the tide of the war changed and with it the situation we are now mired in.

Not only did Syria alongside Iranian forces fight rebels, they specifically targeted, moderate Western-backed units in order to decimate their numbers and leave only radical Islamic groups on the battlefield forcing the U.S. and its allies to pick between a certifiable mass murderer in Assad or groups such as ISIS and Al-Nusra.

It was a clever strategy and one that worked too well given the Obama’s support of the corrupt Al-Maliki government in Iraq, preserving ISIS at a critical time when its numbers were small and lacked cash and weapons. It gained both when it exploited the divided government in Iraq; split apart by Iranian regime’s insistence on a Shia only leadership thereby pushing some of the Sunnis straight into the waiting arms of ISIS and leading directly to the blitzkrieg that toppled Mosul and delivered ISIS its first major victories.

Less than two years later, as Iran was again on the ropes with its resources depleted and rebel forces on the verge of breaking out again in Syria, Iranian mullahs took the step of begging Russia to intervene and save its proverbial goat, which Vladimir Putin was all too happy to oblige, sensing an opportunity to preserve its naval base on the Mediterranean while filling the power vacuum left by the Obama administration’s total withdrawal from the region.

But President Trump’s decision to retaliate against Syria for the use of chemical weapons changed the game plan entirely and now raises the question of how to best move forward?

There is no doubt that the most desirable solution in Syria is a diplomatic one, but focusing on removing Assad from power is only treating the symptom. The real sickness that afflicts Syria is the presence of the Iranian regime there; it is so embedded many Syrians have taken to view Iranian soldiers as an occupation force.

By removing Iran from Syria, the situation resolves itself in a myriad of ways: Russia would lose its key partner on the ground; A peace deal with rebels will definitely prevail; and the Syrian people would have the chance to choose their own destiny.

It would also allow for the repatriation and resettlement of the four million refugees that have fled Syria since the war began.

And the key to pushing Iran out of Syria lies within supporting—fully—the dissident movement within Iran itself.

As Reuel Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained in an editorial in the New York Post:

“The regime’s survival is now dependent on unsteady security services and the power of patronage, which ebbs and flows with the price of oil. Iran’s continuing stage-managed elections and colorless apparatchiks, including President Hassan Rouhani, a founding father of the feared intelligence ministry who mimics reformist slogans, have failed to convince, much less inspire,” they said.

“Today, the Islamist regime resembles the Soviet Union of the 1970s — an exhausted entity incapable of reforming itself while drowning in corruption and bent on costly imperialism,” they added. “If Washington were serious about doing to Iran what it helped to do to the USSR, it would seek to weaken the theocracy by pressing it on all fronts. A crippling sanctions regime that punishes the regime for its human-rights abuses is a necessity. Such a move would not just impose penalties on Tehran for violating international norms but send a signal to the Iranian people that the United States stands behind their aspirations.”

Re-prioritizing human rights as a dominant issue with Iran moving forward would place the U.S. back on the moral high ground that the Obama administration vacated and serve as an effective counter to the ceaseless arguments made by the Iran lobby opining about potential economic benefits of trade with Iran.

A new report by human rights group Amnesty International showed that Iran remained a dominant executioner of its own people, second in the world only to China, which makes hammering the regime on human rights all the more critical.

That emphasis on human rights was boosted by the European Union’s decision to extend sanctions until April 2018 on Iran for “serious human rights violations.”

The bloc has also extended by a year its travel ban and an asset freeze on 82 Iranian people and one entity, as well as a ban on exports to Iran of equipment for monitoring telecommunications and other gear that “might be used for internal repression.”

Sir David Amess, a member of the British Parliament, pointed out in an editorial in the Washington Examiner that the key to confronting Iran ultimately is to cut off the IRGC’s commerce as outlined by a leading Iranian dissident group.

“The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) specifically identified the sites of some 90 docks operated exclusively by the IRGC within Iranian ports. The information was obtained from the network of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), which has assets within the clerical regime and the IRGC itself and made international headlines in 2002 when it revealed key details about the regime’s nuclear program,” Amess said.

“Iran’s destabilizing regional influence and its subversive activities will only be diminished if the domestic and international power of the IRGC is confronted and constrained, first through the rightful designation of the organization as a terrorist organization and then through the sanctioning of all its economic activities followed by financing regional conflicts and threats against the West,” he added.

Ultimately the U.S. should use its influence to specifically diminish the IRGC and its influence in Syria if there is ever to be any hope of a lasting peace there.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Plays With Lives of Innocent Pawns

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Iran Regime Plays With Lives of Innocent Pawns

Iran Regime Plays With Lives of Innocent Pawns

One of the hallmarks of the Iranian regime has been its callous disregard for the value of human life. It is a characteristic that pervades much of the regime’s activities from its foreign policy to judicial process to economy.

If one examines history, totalitarian and fascist governments have often worked diligently to reduce the value of an individual life in favor of the collective good as a means of exerting greater control over the people.

Iran is no different as the mullahs figured out that the pathway to ironclad control in the wake of the revolution was to ensure that dissenters could be arrested, beaten, imprisoned, exiled and even killed with virtual impunity.

That philosophy has been at the center ever since and to this day has manifested itself in policies that have caused pain and suffering across the entire Middle East.

In foreign policy, the Iranian regime has pursued conflicts that have resulted in some of the worst humanitarian disasters since the end of World War II, namely the Syrian civil war which has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over four million people.

The mullahs’ decision to enter that war—after the Assad regime was found to be using chemical weapons on its own people—and save Assad sparked a sectarian conflict that now rages across Iraq, Yemen and has sparked now into the Gulf States.

The fact that Iranian regime is so willing to start conflicts, especially through the use of proxies such as terror groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. Now come increasingly more worrisome reports over evidence that the Iranian regime may be behind terror activities in Bahrain including the operation of a secret bomb factory.

According to the Washington Post, the men who built the secret bomb factory had been clever — suspiciously so, Bahraini investigators thought, for a gang known mostly for lobbing Molotov cocktails at police. The underground complex had been hewed, foot by foot, beneath the floor of a suburban villa, with no visible traces at street level and only a single entrance, hidden behind a kitchen cabinet.

But the real surprises lay inside. In one room, police found $20,000 lathes and hydraulic presses for making armor-piercing projectiles capable of slicing through a tank. Another held box upon box of the military explosive C-4, all of foreign origin, in quantities that could sink a battleship the Post said.

“Most of these items have never been seen in Bahrain,” the country’s investigators said in a confidential technical assessment provided to U.S. and European officials this past fall that offered new detail on the arsenals seized in the villa and in similar raids that have occurred sporadically over nearly three years. In sheer firepower, the report said, the caches were both a “game-changer” and — matched against lightly armed police — “overkill.”

The report, a copy of which was shown to The Washington Post, partly explains the growing unease among some Western intelligence officials over tiny Bahrain, a stalwart U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf and home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Six years after the start of a peaceful Shiite protest movement against the country’s Sunni-led government, U.S. and European analysts now see an increasingly grave threat emerging on the margins of the uprising: heavily armed militant cells supplied and funded, officials say, by Iran.

That disturbing revelation shows that the mullahs’ decision to widen conflict in the region and continue pursuing their vision of a greater sphere of Shia influence; contrary to all the protestations and messaging of the Iran lobby, is a core cause of most of the turmoil in the Middle East.

Even the practice of snatching hostages has become a standard practice for the mullahs from the very beginning of the revolution with the American embassy takeover to the recent practice of arresting and imprisoning dual-national citizens based on the despicable principle that Iran does not recognize dual citizenship.

For the mullahs, the value of hostages has been unfortunately proven true by the rash and unwise decision by the Obama administration to effectively ransom American hostages as part of the nuclear agreement negotiations. That only emboldened the mullahs to continue the practice.

Several of their current prisoners include a British mother and charity aid worker, a missing American former FBI agent, two businessmen and an American college student who was recently released on bail.

The American of Iranian descent was arrested in Iran in July and sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment on dubious charges has been released on bail after he went on a hunger strike, rights activists reported on Monday, according to the New York Times.

The American, Robin Shahini was released about two weeks ago, just before the start of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, according to news by rights groups.

It was unclear whether Shahini’s release was temporary or if he could leave the country, Shahini had been required to post bail of 2 billion rials — about $60,000 — and that he could be sent back to prison if his conviction were affirmed on appeal.

Shahini, a graduate student at San Diego State University, is one of at least four Americans of Iranian descent who have been imprisoned in Iran since the country negotiated a nuclear agreement with major powers including the United States in 2015.

Many rights activists regard the imprisonments as a warning to Americans of Iranian descent not to view the nuclear agreement as a sign of better relations between the United States and Iran.

 

Other Americans held in Iran include Siamak and Baquer Namazi, a father and son who were sentenced in October to 10 years’ imprisonment, as well as Karan Vafadari, an art gallery owner, and his wife, Afarin Niasari, an Iranian with permanent United States residency status. The precise nature of the charges against them are unclear.

Iranian regime considers imprisoned Iranian-Americans to be citizens of Iran and does not afford them consular privileges ordinarily granted to foreign citizens.

For the mullahs, granting any individual basic human rights seems to be out of their plans.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Desperate for Foreign Policy Wins

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Iran Regime Desperate for Foreign Policy Wins

Soldiers loyal to Yemen’s government stand next to mines planted by the al-Houthi group in locations where they controlled in frontline in the province of Marib, October 4, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Next May Iran will hold a presidential “election” that will lack for one thing: suspense. In the Iranian regime, uncertainty is anathema to the mullahs, especially Ali Khamenei and his handpicked minions on the various parliamentary councils that review and decide which candidates will appear on the ballot.

For all the handwringing and angst being generated by the Iran lobby over the perceived vulnerability of current president Hassan Rouhani, there is no doubt that if Khamenei wants Rouhani back to carry out his policies, he’s going to be the next president.

Given that certainty, the domestic situation for the ruling mullahs is anything but favorable to them. The Iranian economy remains stuck in reverse. Any hopes for it to be jumpstarted by the billions of dollars released as part of the nuclear agreement evaporated as the mullahs chose to redirect those funds to support the teetering Assad regime in Syria and the war in Yemen, as well as go on a multi-billion dollar buying binge of Russia weapons.

Unemployment remains high, especially among Iranian youth, coupled with rising prices for everything from fuel to consumer goods. Add that to miserable environmental conditions that have resulted in long droughts that have devastated farming and turned vast stretches of Iran into desert, and you get massive street protests—not about politics, but about economic conditions.

The mullahs are not fools, they are crafty political hands, adept at deception and misdirection, and they have dredged up another diversion in constantly pitting Iran in perpetual cycles of war and foreign policy crisis.

If it wasn’t the Syrian civil war, it was the rebellion in Yemen. If it wasn’t the sectarian conflict in Iraq, it was the decades-long civil war in Lebanon. Throughout all of it, the mullahs have used foreign policy to divert attention from the misery at home and gin up a jingoistic fervor.

Now as Iran stares at another presidential election, the mullahs don’t want a repeat of 2009 where massive street protests were violently put down in response to cries of a rigged election.

This explains why Rouhani has made a trek to Moscow to call upon Russia to serve as a guarantor of sorts for Iranian regime’s interests in Syria. Rouhani is dangling the prospect of forming a mutual barrier to U.S. policy interests in the Middle East, as well as the tempting offer of access to Iranian bases for Russian military forces.

Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif reopened the door to Russian use of Iranian airbases to carry out strikes in Syria, in another sign of increasing cooperation between the two countries, according to the Daily Caller.

Russia carried out some airstrikes on Syria from an Iranian airbase in August, but was later rebuked by Iranian authorities for bragging about it. After Russian state media trumpeted the strike as a major strategic coup, Iran’s minister of defense accused them of a “betrayal of trust” publicly. He declared at the time, “it is finished, for now.”

Zarif signaled that this time-out may be over saying “Russia doesn’t have a military base (in Iran), we have good cooperation, and on a case by case basis, when it is necessary for Russians fighting terrorism to use Iranian facilities, we will make a decision.”

In Moscow, Rouhani and Putin signed several bilateral agreements that served as window dressing for these kinds of state visits. The two leaders affirmed their commitment to peace in Syria, where they have both backed the Assad regime, as well as introducing new economic cooperation mostly in energy and industry, especially calls for reduction in oil production as a means of boosting global oil prices.

 

Both nations’ economies have been severely impacted by the steep decline in petroleum as a result of stepped up production from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

 

Though Moscow and Tehran both support Assad, their views on Turkey and its involvement in the conflict have differed. Though Moscow envisions Ankara as a part of the solution to the Syrian conflict, Tehran has been more wary – particularly after Moscow and Ankara left Tehran out of a truce they brokered in December, according to Voice of America News.

 

Aside from the photo opportunities for Rouhani, the Iranian regime stayed the course in maintaining its ever-increasing variety of militant and extremes actions, including reports of a renewed military commitment to Houthi rebels in Yemen in an increasingly volatile war that threatens to drag Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States into direct conflict with Iran.

A group of analysts known for research in global security threats said in a new report that the increase in Iranian involvement is to offset the gains made by Yemeni government troops supported by the Saudi-led Arab coalition forces.

An increased Iranian role will prolong Yemen’s civil war and make the conflict more sectarian, worsening Yemen’s humanitarian crisis and allowing Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to expand its support base within Yemen, according to Gulf News.

“The deployment of inter-operable proxy forces is part of Iran’s evolution of a form of hybrid warfare that will allow it to project significant force far from its borders and fundamentally alter the balance of power in the region. Iran may increase its engagement in Yemen if US support for the Saudi-led coalition threatens the Al Houthi-Saleh faction’s survival,” they said.

The Critical Threats Project run by the public policy think tank the American Enterprise Institute has published the analysis on their website, providing information on Iranian military assistance to Yemeni rebels.

“Iran may attempt to incorporate the Al Houthis into its Axis of Resistance coalition, which Iran uses to contain the US and its regional allies,” the report stresses, warning that further escalation in the Yemeni civil war will threaten freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, risking both global commercial markets and the US Navy’s freedom of movement in the region.”

The analysis claimed that Iran had attempted to smuggle over 2,000 small arms into Yemen in 2015 and 2016, in addition to a large stockpile of other weapons.

“Iran likely facilitated the development of an Al Houthi-Saleh naval mining program. Mines struck a government coast guard ship near Mokha port, Taiz governorate on March 11 and a fishing vessel near Midi district, northwestern Hajjah governorate on March 8. Iran provides sophisticated weaponry that allows the Al Houthi-Saleh faction to hold terrain, counter Saudi-led coalition capabilities, and threaten US freedom of movement in the Red Sea,” the report warned.

As the flashes go off in Moscow, the rest of the Middle East is dreading what next chapter of hell the Iranian regime is set to unleash.

Michael Tomlinson

Khamenei Promises More Crackdowns on Election Protests

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Khamenei Promises More Crackdowns on Election Protests

Khamenei Promises More Crackdowns on Election Protests

Back in 2009, the Middle East was being rocked by the Arab Spring, a pro-democracy movement that toppled governments throughout the region and put despotic regimes on the defensive.

At the time, the Iranian regime’s much despised president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was running for “re-election” in a contest widely viewed as unlikely for him given the historic disapproval of the Iranian people and their deep desire for democratic change.

But as with all things under the careful watch of the mullahs, his election was essentially guaranteed in what the international community dubbed a rigged election.

In response, Iran was rocked with mass protests and demonstrations the likes of which the Iranian regime had not seen before in the most serious threat to the iron rule of the religious establishment. Alarmed and in response to keep their hold on power, the top mullah Ali Khamenei ordered a widespread crackdown that set human rights back in Iran decades in resulted in scores killed and thousands beaten, arrested and imprisoned.

The mass protests were aided in large part by the emergence of social media which helped rally young and old Iranians alike to dispute the election and served as a splash of cold water in the regime’s face that it would have to change as well, but not in terms of granting more freedoms.

By the time 2013 rolled around, the mullahs had gotten wise to international opinion and instead staged an election by removing anyone from the ballot that could even be considered a dissident and instead offered up an old loyalist in Hassan Rouhani repackaged as a smiling, tweeting, kindly “moderate.”

The end result was another sham election and in comparison to 2009 with favorable media attention abroad. It was also aided by the creation of an Iran lobby apparatus designed to push forward more positive narratives about the regime in news media and among elected officials, especially the National Iranian American Council.

Since then, while Rouhani has paraded himself as ca champion of the oppressed, Iran has plunged even further into disrepair.

It is involved now in two full-blown wars in Syria and Yemen, while spending billions of dollars in cash to support the Assad regime, Shiite militias in Iraq, its long-time Hezbollah proxy, and a rebuilding of its vast military.

It has also cracked down viciously at home, oppressing women, religious and ethnic minorities and even going on a binge of hostage taking amongst dual-national citizens including Americans, Canadians and Brits.

Now the stage is set for another election this May and once Khamenei has set the table by declaring that the regime would not tolerate any interference; meaning only the regime’s candidate will be elected and everyone should stay off the streets.

“I will confront anyone who wants to tamper with the results of the people’s vote. In previous years and previous elections …, it was the same. Some of it was in front of people’s eyes and they became aware of it. And some of it they were not aware of but I was informed about it,” he said in Iranian New Year remarks carried live on state television, according to Reuters.

“It was revealed in 2009 – they came out and drew battle lines. And in other years in other ways, but in all these years I stood against them and said whatever the results of the election are, they must be carried out.”

Two of the candidates from the 2009 presidential election, which put hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into office for a second term despite large protests over alleged vote fraud that shook the Islamic Republic, have been under house arrest since 2011. Although part of the regime apparatus, they were detained for calling for street protests at the same time that pro-democracy uprisings were convulsing Tunisia and Egypt.

This year’s election will never be in doubt. Whoever Khamenei wants is going to win, this is a matter of course since he controls the policy making body that will have final say on whoever gets on the ballot in the first place.

Imagine if the Democratic or Republican parties had final say on who got on a presidential ballot without having to suffer through the rigors of a primary contest? In essence, that is what the Iranian regime does on a regular basis; it’s a rigged game.

But the Iranian regime is becoming more sophisticated in the ways of politics. Just as it adjusted to the brutal crackdowns following the 2009 elections, it is following up on the initial creation of the Iran lobby with a broader call for more Iranians in the West to become active lobbyists for the regime’s causes as outlined in an editorial by Michael Rubin in Commentary.

“An Iran watcher and Iranian citizen recently alerted me to this clip showing Mahmoud Alavi, Iran’s intelligence minister, on Iranian national television suggesting there are Iranians in the West who have a lobby for the regime,” Rubin said.

“Alavi does not mention NIAC, but the number of politically active groups that focus on issues of sanctions, defending Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Iran’s nuclear program can like be counted not only on one hand but rather on one finger. If Iran’s intelligence minister believes that Tehran can leverage a specific lobby in the West on behalf not of Iranians but rather of the Islamic Republic, perhaps it is time for American counterintelligence authorities to take a far harder look at whatever lobby to which Alavi might be referring,” he added.

Rouhani’s election will be critical as the regime enters a new phase of expansion and aggression as it puts its newfound billions in cash it received as part of the nuclear deal to good use in furthering the war in Yemen and securing Syria as part of its Shiite sphere of influence.

According to Reuters, Iran is sending advanced weapons and military advisers to Yemen’s rebel Houthi movement, stepping up support for its Shiite ally in a civil war whose outcome could sway the balance of power in the Middle East, regional and Western sources say.

Sources with knowledge of the military movements, who declined to be identified, say that in recent months Iran has taken a greater role in the two-year-old conflict by stepping up arms supplies and other support. This mirrors the strategy it has used to support its Lebanese ally Hezbollah in Syria.

A senior Iranian official said Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Qods Force – the external arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – met top IRGC officials in Tehran last month to look at ways to “empower” the Houthis.

We may very soon see the Arabian Peninsula erupt in a war not unlike what has convulsed Syria if the mullahs have their way.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Goes to Bat for IRGC and Ballistic Missiles

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Iran Lobby Goes to Bat for IRGC and Ballistic Missiles

Iran Lobby Goes to Bat for IRGC and Ballistic Missiles

The twin pillars of the Iranian regime’s military future lies within the Revolutionary Guard Corps which puts boots on the ground to fight its battles and the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying out its biggest threats of global destruction.

They represent the center of power within the Iranian regime since without the IRGC to enforce its’ will, the mullahs in Tehran would be turned out like beggars in the streets by an oppressed Iranian people, while the threat of ballistic missiles hangs like a dagger over Europe and neighboring Arab countries.

It is no surprise then to see the Iran lobby going all out in pushing silly arguments in support of the IRGC and the regime’s missiles as evidenced by two pieces of fiction from the National Iranian American Council.

In one piece authored by Tyler Cullis and appearing in Foreign Affairs, the Iran lobby argues vehemently against designating the IRGC a “foreign terrorist organization, although many of its leaders and subsidiary commercial entities it controls have already been targeted for sanctions by the U.S. and other government for supporting terrorism.

Cullis argues that designating the IRGC would put “U.S. forces in Iraq” in danger and undermine the nuclear agreement reached with Iran, but Cullis argues against his own position when he readily admits that the IRGC is already heavily sanctioned because of its “Iran’s ballistic missile program, its human rights abuses around Iran’s June 2009 presidential election and its disruption and monitoring of Iranian citizens’ communications.”

He also calls any further sanctions a duplicate of current U.S. sanctions so why does he argue against this effort?

Because he knows, as does the rest of the Iran lobby, that designation of the IRGC as an organizational whole is vastly different that current sanctions which only target individuals within the IRGC and some entities. A designation of the whole effectively targets all of the criminal enterprises the IRGC is involved with that siphon monies away from the Iranian people and economy and directly into the coffers of the regime and the pocketbooks of the elites.

Cullis makes the same claim the Iran lobby has made over and over again which is that anything and everything needs to be done to preserve a badly flawed nuclear deal; including treating the chief sponsor of terrorism in Iran with kid gloves.

Cullis makes the absurd claim that Shiite militias controlled by the IRGC—which have been responsible for the deaths and attacks on American service personnel in Iraq through IEDs—would end up trying to frustrate American efforts against ISIS. It’s a claim so ridiculous that it doesn’t even deserve a response since we already know very well that Shiite militias already actively engage and fight American-backed forces and advisors in Iraq and Syria.

But the IRGC defense is only half the battle, as the NIAC’s Ryan Costello takes up the cause of defending Iran’s ballistic missile program in a briefing memo on NIAC’s website.

Costello bases his arguments on a lawyerly-like parsing of fine print to excuse Iran’s missile program, but ignores the intent of United Nations resolutions which seek to actively discourage Iran from becoming another North Korea. The fact that Costello is arguing against that development is deeply disturbing and indicative of how little the Iran lobby fears Iran’s crash course race to catch up to North Korea.

Where Costello falls in lock-step with his partner Cullis’ editorial, is in making the same silly argument that sanctions against ballistic missiles threatens the nuclear agreement. Using the same twisted pretzel logic virtually anything the mullahs dislikes threatens the nuclear agreement:

  • Protest the hanging of Iranian dissidents? That threatens the nuclear agreement;
  • Demand the freeing of American prisoners? That threatens the nuclear agreement;
  • Call for a halt to Iran’s support for Houthi rebels in Yemen? That threatens the nuclear agreement;
  • Force Iranian-backed Shiite militias to stop killing Sunnis in Iraq and Syria? That threatens the nuclear agreement;
  • Ask that Iran stop allowing its morality police to beat women on the streets? That threatens the nuclear agreement.

At a certain point, the NIAC’s logic becomes insanely stupid and that’s the point it has reached with Costello and Cullis’ propaganda pieces.

Costello even makes the excuse FOR the mullahs that Iran’s ballistic missiles program is “intrinsically” tied to its experience in the Iran-Iraq war and thus Iran has a right to these missiles to prevent any future attacks.

While Costello claims Iran has no interest in developing missiles with a range beyond 2,300 kilometers, he neglects to mention that allowing Iran to have a missile fleet with those ranges puts most of Europe, North Africa, the entire Middle East and virtually every important American military and naval base in the region in the crosshairs of Iranian missiles.

Neither Costello nor Cullis ever address the basic problem with their positions which is the lack of fundamental trust the world has in the religious leadership of Iran. The mullahs are fanatical in their pursuit of expanding the Islamic revolution and zealous in the crackdown of any dissenting opinions.

These heinous positions are illustrated in the decision over the weekend to sentence to death an Iranian and American-Iranian dual national on charges of promoting moral corruption.

The defendants, who have not been named, are believed to be a couple involved in the art industry who were arrested in July last year. They ran a leading art gallery in Tehran, the Iranian capital, and were known to associate with foreign diplomats, according to the Financial Times.

Iran has arrested several Iranians holding dual nationality in recent months in a move analysts suggest is intended to intimidate those associated with foreign businesses or who have social connections with foreigners, the Times said.

Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, Tehran prosecutor-general, said on Sunday that the man and woman had been sentenced because they established “a new cult” and made “alcoholic beverages, encouraged vice . . . through throwing mixed parties [and] . . . exhibiting and selling obscene images at gallery”.

Laura Carnahan

In Iran the Plight of Women Contradicts International Women’s Day

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In Iran the Plight of Women Contradicts International Women’s Day

Iranian demonstrators march after weekly Friday prayers in Tehran on July 8, 2011 during a protest asking the government to intensify its crackdown on women and men to enforce the Islamic dress code. AFP PHOTO/ATTA KENARE (Photo credit should read ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images)

The world is taking part in International Women’s Day in a myriad of ways; some of it commercial offering to donate $100 to the cause of your choice, and other’s political with marches planned in the U.S. protesting a wide range of issues from reproductive rights to opposition to administration’s policies.

Women the world over are gathering to reinforce their solidarity with their gender and to support issues of concern to them. It’s an annual spectacle that for many celebrates the freedom and opportunities women are now enjoying everywhere…except in the Iranian regime.

Although International Women’s Day has been around since 1908, its origins as a fight for equal pay and voting rights has morphed into the hashtag #IWD and lost some of its fervor. It’s also at times celebrated not as a call to political arms, but now used to tout corporate branding campaigns emphasizing a product or company’s openness to women.

Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that in many places in the world, women continue to be treated as second-class citizens or even property of their husbands and fathers. Nowhere is that more brutally explicit than in Iran where the ruling mullahs have consistently passed laws that would make any Western feminist breath fire in reaction.

The Iran lobby has tried to cover up this fact by praising window-dressing efforts to empower women in Iran, but those efforts have rung hollow in the face of escalating brutality aimed specifically at women.

Shahriar Kia, a political analyst and member of the Iranian opposition, the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, outlined some of these practices in a piece for American Thinker.

“Iranian regime President Hassan Rouhani has recently been making remarks about women’s rights (!) in an attempt to cloak his portion of the Iranian regime’s misogynist report card,” Kia writes. “In his own memoirs, from page 571 to 573, Rouhani explains in detail how in 1980 he began enforcing mandatory hijab regulations as the mullahs began their historical campaign against Iranian women.”

Rouhani’s tenure has also been the hallmark home of systematic oppression against women, workers, college students, writers, journalists, dissident bloggers; imposing poverty and unemployment on a majority of Iranians; continuous threats made against the media; punishment of political prisoners have increased significantly even in comparison to the years of Iran’s firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During Rouhani’s human rights violations-stained tenure, an average of two to three people have been executed on a daily basis, Kia adds.

The mistreatment of women in Iran extends also to non-Iranian women citizens as in the appalling treatment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British charity worker who was sentenced to prison for five years by a secret Iranian regime court and has been abused and denied much-needed medical care and given the option of only be able to see her child in prison.

Last year a UN body of human rights experts described her detention as “arbitrary” and said she had been denied a fair trial, according to the Telegraph.

This week, the UN released a new report on human rights in Iran, written by Asma Jahangir, the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran.

From the outset, it is clear that there has been no marked improvement in human rights in the Gulf nation, despite President Hassan Rouhani signing a Citizens’ Rights Charter in December 2016.

The 14,000-word report discusses both ongoing cases of abuse (like the execution of juveniles) and urgent situations (like the fate of political prisoners denied medical care).

Jahangir, who spoke to non-governmental organizations, intellectuals, lawyers and victims to ensure the accuracy of this report, also covers torture, the bias judicial system, free speech and women’s rights and clearly details just how far human rights, especially for women, have sunk in Iran.

For its part, the Iranian regime as usual blasted the UN report and defended the indefensible in its human rights situation.

In an address to a high-level meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi denounced a recent resolution raised in the council as “totally baseless and unacceptable,” claiming that political use of human rights by certain countries would pose a real challenge to the council’s goals and undermine and discredit the UN body, according to regime-controlled Tasnim News.

The UN report stated that “the Islamic Republic of Iran has reportedly executed the highest number of juvenile offenders in the world during the past decade. Despite an absolute ban on the practice under international law, the penal code continues to explicitly retain the death penalty for boys of at least fifteen lunar years of age and girls of at least 9 lunar years for qisas (retribution in kind) or hudud crimes, like homicide, adultery or sodomy.”

“The Special Rapporteur urges the Islamic Republic of Iran to take proactive steps to promote the full realization of the rights of human rights defenders and to refrain from any acts that violate the rights of human rights defenders because of their human rights work. The government should take strict measures to ensure that the security and intelligence apparatus does not use reprisals against families of those who monitor or campaign against human rights violations or express views that are contrary to government policies,” the report added.

Aside from the cruelty of human rights in Iran, which includes severe punishments for even minor infractions such as not wearing traditional hijab head coverings, Iranian women are denied economic growth and access to good paying jobs.

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of labor force statistics from 114 nations from 2010 to 2016, the median female share of a nation’s workforce was 45.4%, but in the case of Iran, women made up only a paltry 17.4% of the workforce, ranking near the bottom among all countries.

For all of the talk of empowerment and moderation in Iran by the regime and its Iran lobby supporters, the truth is dismal and the outlook for women even bleaker.

The next time women march for Women’s Day, it might be worth remembering the millions of Iranian women who are denied their futures and can’t even march in protest for fear of arrest and imprisonment.

 

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

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Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

It seems that the “echo chamber” created by members of the Obama administration and the Iran lobby is still alive and kicking and trying desperately to keep support flowing to the Iranian regime in light of increasing calls to get tough on Iranian regime because of its continued support for terrorism, brutal human rights abuses and flagrant violations of international sanctions with ballistic missile launches.

The Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, has been especially busy making excuses every time Iran hangs a dissident, puts down a protest or sentences a dual national to prison.

Many of those “experts” sympathetic to the regime and preserving the nuclear deal at all costs continue to push false narratives like a used car salesman pushing a clunker with a rolled back odometer.

One example is a piece authored by Jeffrey A. Sinclair in Foreign Affairs in which he argues that President Trump needs to strengthen Iran’s “moderates.”

“The goal should be to guard against any further escalation of hostilities. After all, unless the administration is willing to wage war with Iran, this confrontation won’t achieve anything useful for the United States. What it will do is further strengthen the hardliners in Tehran, a process that is already underway, and undermine moderates such as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif less than three months before Iran’s presidential election,” Sinclair writes.

Rarely has a paragraph been loaded with more inaccuracies than that one.

First of all, Trump has made it clear with his criticisms of the war in Iraq during the campaign that he is not in favor of nation-building by military force, but he has also made clear he was not going to offer a blank check to regimes such as Iran and Syria to do whatever they wanted since the end result of those kinds of actions has brought chaos to the Middle East.

Trump has laid out a belief that ignoring Iranian regimes’s militant actions does little to ensure regional stability and peace. Confronting the regime on issues such as human rights, proxy wars or provocative military acts are the right policy if Trump’s administration takes up that road, but saying that such a path only leads to war is one of the boldest falsehoods of the echo chamber.

Trump has at his disposal of plethora of tools, many used successfully by previous administrations, to force Iran to the bargaining table which is exactly what happened recently. The only problem was that the Obama administration fumbled the ball by caving in to every demand the Iranian mullahs had and getting little in return.

Contrary to Sinclair’s missives, confronting Iranian regime is exactly the right course of action since to do nothing except issue paper condemnations does nothing to rectify the situation. Using harsh language as Iran’s Quds Forces supply Houthi rebels in Yemen with arms so they can destabilize the country and risk a regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran breaking out is not only bad foreign policy, it’s stupid.

Also, when Sinclair calls Rouhani and Zarif “moderates” the only polite thing to do is to keep from laughing hysterically out loud.

The only real moderates in Iran sit in Iranian prisons or have been driving out of the country as political refugees. As a religious theocracy, Iran’s mullahs maintain an iron grip on power. Rouhani did not become president to push a liberalizing agenda for reform. He was hand selected by Ali Khamenei to present the West with a more benign face in order to trigger negotiations to ease crippling sanctions.

The world is not going to see any competition during these upcoming presidential elections in Iran. Nothing is left to chance by the mullahs, which is why the vast majority of political dissidents, journalists, artists, filmmakers, students and anyone else stepping out of line has already been rounded up in advance of the elections.

“Because other U.S. and Western sanctions relating to Iran’s alleged terrorist activities remained in place, and because international banks remained highly skittish when it came to dealing with Iran, economic relief did not come quickly enough,” Sinclair said. “Overall, the administration made too few efforts to help Iran economically, as other terrorism-related sanctions were kept in place. The Obama team, it seemed, had taken its eye off the ball. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and others knew that Iranian moderates needed a post-deal economic boost to secure their position.”

This is another fallacious argument being made that the U.S. somehow was responsible for jumpstarting an Iranian economy that ranks almost dead last in the world in transparency and corruption. Also, since sanctions related to terrorism were not part of the nuclear deal, the U.S. and Trump are under no obligation to lift them, especially since Iranian regime regularly supports terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Shiite militias responsible for wholesale slaughter of Sunni villages in Iraq.

Sinclair also criticizes discussions to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization and contends such a move would “escalate tensions.”

It’s hard to imagine how much worse tensions can get when Iranian regime’s navy detains American sailors, American citizens are being held in Iranian prisons and Iran’s proxies are causing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Sinclair—and the rest of the Iran lobby—seems to place its collective hopes on the few wispy strands of less intensive anti-American actions than in the past as positive signs for change.

“For now, signs from Iran are somewhat positive. The yearly celebration of the founding of the Islamic Republic (expected to be a bonanza for the hardliners) turned out to be muted—excessively so, which was a clear sign of at least momentary moderation from the top leadership,” he writes. “In addition, a series of prominent hardliner clerics—including some of the leading clerics in Qom—have in recent days publicly expressed their support for keeping the nuclear deal in place.”

The claimed positive step is at a time that the Iranian regime test fired another Ballistic missile during this period and of course the mullahs are going to express support for the nuclear deal since its amounts to a giant ATM card the regime has been using to buy billions of dollars in new weapons from Russia.

These are not encouraging signs no matter what the echo chamber says and it’s about time we ignore it.

Michael Tomlinson

Academy Awards Shocker Came From Iran Regime Comments Not Best Picture Gaffe

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Academy Awards Shocker Came From Iran Regime Comments Not Best Picture Gaffe

Academy Awards Shocker Came From Iran Regime Comments Not Best Picture Gaffe

Pretty much the entire planet has seen or heard about the mistaken Best Picture announcement for “La La Land” only to find out that “Moonlight” had indeed won instead in a mistake that put Steve Harvey’s mistaken Miss Universe crowning to shame.

Aside from the stunned faces of the audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, the moment became an instant viral sensation as social media buzzed about the historic mistake, but the real shocker came a day later when the Iranian regime’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif lauded comments made by the cast and crew of the film “The Salesman” which won an Oscar for best foreign film critical of the Trump administration’s immigration visa moratorium.

Zarif tweeted out his own congratulations for the statement read for Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi who chose to stay away from the 89th Annual Academy Awards ceremony in protest over President Trump’s travel ban.

“Proud of cast & crew of ‘The Salesman’ for Oscar & stance against #MuslimBan. Iranians have represented culture & civilization for millennia,” said Zarif’s tweet.

Zarif’s tweet was met by a blistering series of responses from CNN anchor Jake Tapper who took Zarif to task for lauding an Iranian filmmaker while the regime regularly imprisons other dissident Iranian filmmakers.

On Monday, Tapper tweeted how Iran has treated filmmakers in the past, which included long jail sentences and not being permitted to leave the country for decades, according to the Daily Caller.

Tapper went on to list several prominent Iranian filmmakers who are languishing in regime prisons.

“2/Iran regularly jails its filmmakers. Such as Keywan Karimi guilty of ‘insulting sanctities’ in October 2015,” he tweeted.

“3/Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to make an ‘antiregime’ documentary,” he continued.

“4/Documentary filmmaker/women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi was jailed for collaborating with the BBC,” he added.

“5/ Musician Mehdi Rajabjan and filmmaker Hossein Rajabian were jailed for “insulting Islamic sanctities,” he tweeted.

“6/ So FM @JZarif? The traditions of your brilliant people are being oppressed by the tyranny of your government. Tweets notwithstanding,” Tapper concluded.

Tapper correctly points out the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime when it lauds comments that support its propaganda efforts, and yet deals harshly with anyone caught criticizing the regime of stepping outside of approved cultural or moral norms.

All of which makes comments made by top mullah Ali Khamenei earlier this month even more interesting when seen in the light of Zarif’s tweets.

In a speech in the East Azerbaijan region of Iran, Khamenei said that a war on Iran’s culture and economy is more dangerous to his Islamic regime than any military threat from the West, according to Breitbart News.

“A European official said to our officials that a war in Iran would have been inevitable if it had not been for the Bar-Jaam,” Khamenei said, referring to the nuclear agreement brokered by the Obama administration and Western allies. “That official said that if the Bar-Jaam had not been signed, the war would have been definite.”

“This is a blatant lie!” Khamenei said in the speech. “Why do they speak about war? They do so because they want to switch our minds to a military war, but the real war is something else.”

“The real war is an economic war, the real war is the war of sanctions, the real war is the arenas of work, activity, and technology inside the country,” Khamenei said. “This is the real war!”

“They draw our attention to a military war so that we ignore this war,” Khamenei said. “The real war is a cultural war.

“There are so many television and internet networks which are busy diverting the hearts and minds of our youth away from religion, our sacred beliefs, morality, modesty and the like,” Khamenei said.

In this regard Khamenei is correct since what the mullahs abhor more than anything else is free and independent thinking it seems. Free expression and divergent opinion is met with a fury from the mullahs akin to a full scale invasion; except for the ruling mullahs an invasion of ideas seems to be more dangerous than U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Iran.

This also explains why the regime has always been especially brutal in its crackdowns of artists, journalists, bloggers and filmmakers as a means of controlling public discourse and the flow of creativity among the Iranian people.

It also explains why the regime has worked so hard at restricting access to social media platforms and web sites judged to have anti-regime materials on it.

Inevitably though, the slow creep of the arts have proven to be a strong antidote to totalitarian thinking and we can only hope that the Academy Awards will one day be celebrating the work of an Iranian filmmaker who know sits in prison.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Regime Does Away With Moderate Façade

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Iran Regime Does Away With Moderate Façade

Archive-Iran Regime Does Away With Moderate Façade

The old adage goes “judge me by my deeds, not my words.” It’s appropriate to apply it to the Iranian regime when weighing how to react to the Islamic state. In the case of the new Trump administration, it is becoming increasingly easy to figure out what is motivating the mullahs in Tehran.

The Iran lobby, most notably the National Iranian American Council, has always made the argument to ignore the rhetoric and judge Iran by its people and the “moderates” struggling to gain control of the government.

Notable Iran lobby advocates such as NIAC’s Trita Parsi have literally yelled from the rooftops that Iran was not really interested in confrontations with the U.S. and only wanted a new friendly relationship. It was this slippery slope the Obama administration fell down in acquiescing broadly to the demands of the mullahs in crafting a nuclear deal separate and apart from placing conditions on things such as support for terrorism and abusive human rights.

Unfortunately, virtually none of those promises have come to pass and in the face of a Trump administration that has opted for an aggressive posture towards Iran with newly announced sanctions and the appointment of several vocal regime critics in key cabinet positions, the mullahs seem to have finally decided to drop the charade and stop trying to portray themselves as moderates.

The latest evidence of that came in the form of a full-length animated film depicting an armed confrontation between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the U.S. Navy soon to open in Iranian cinemas.

According to Reuters, the director of the “Battle of Persian Gulf II”, Farhad Azima, said that it was a remarkable coincidence that the release of the film – four years in the making – coincided with a “warmongering” president sitting in the White House.

“I hope that the film shows Trump how American soldiers will face a humiliating defeat if they attack Iran,” Azima told Reuters in a telephone interview from the city of Mashhad in eastern Iran.

The 88-minute animation opens with the U.S. Army attacking an Iranian nuclear reactor, and the U.S. Navy in the Gulf hitting strategic locations across the county.

In the film, the IRGC retaliates by raining its ballistic missiles on U.S. warships.

“They all sink and the film ends as the American ships have turned into an aquarium for fishes at the bottom of the sea,” Azima said.

The main Iranian commander in the film has been intentionally depicted as Qassem Soleimani, the notorious IRGC commander who is overseeing Iran’s military operations in Syria and Iraq against Islamist militants and was designated a supporter of terrorism by the U.S. for his role in coordinating the manufacture and delivery of IEDs to Iranian-controlled Shiite militias in Iraq targeting U.S. personnel.

Soleimani was reportedly seen arriving in Moscow earlier this week in violation of sanctions restricting his travel. He has been to Moscow several times ignoring his travels bans on Iranian airlines to discuss military operations in Syria with Russian officials. His direct pleas have been widely regarded as key to persuading Russia to enter the conflict in order to save the faltering Assad regime.

This is Soleimani’s third trip to Moscow following visits in April and July 2015. Soleimani is thought to be the mastermind behind Iran’s proxy war in Syria in order to prop up the Assad regime. Soleimani met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu days after the Iranian nuclear deal was agreed to in Vienna.

According to Fox News, Soleimani was in Moscow to register the mullahs’ displeasure with Russia’s relationship with Iran’s regional foes, specifically the sale of Russian military equipment to Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

Lest we forget, the Iranian regime has steadily increased the tempo of bell`igerent actions since the nuclear deal, including the detention and parade of American sailors, widening of the wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and a steady stream of propaganda efforts including the routine “Death to America” depictions as well as the launching of increasingly more powerful ballistic missiles.

The latest disclosures of the IRGC’s operation of a vast network of training camps for its own and foreign fighters to be deployed in conflicts abroad by a network of Iranian dissident groups only solidifies the argument that the Iranian regime is done with the pretense of trying to be a more moderate nation.

The dissident groups, led by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, have issued calls for the IRGC to be designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization as a whole.

Iran already is part of the U.S. State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list, along with Syria and Sudan. However, new calls are coming from leading critics of the regime to designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization – and the Trump administration is said to be considering that.

“The people of Iran would welcome the designation of the IRGC, which is responsible for thousands of political executions and tortures in prison. It is also responsible for training terrorists supporting and engaging in terrorist activities outside Iran,” said Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the NCRI, which is the largest Iranian opposition group.

“I believe the time has come for a firm policy on Iran. The failed policy of appeasement has hurt the Iranian people, as well as global peace and security,” she said.

To emphasize the suffering of the Iranian people under the mullahs’ medieval rule, news reports came out of a 14-year old girl suffering a savage beating by the regime’s morality police for wearing ripped jeans.

Zahra*, who The Independent is not identifying for fear she may suffer reprisals, was celebrating her birthday with friends last week when a patrol of “morality police” pulled up.

The teenager said officers tried to force her and her friends into their car in the city of Shiraz, beating them when they resisted.

“There were two women and two men in a huge van and they pushed us into it with the force of their beatings,” she recalled. “Their objection was to the ripped jeans that we were wearing. There were really no other issues concerning my friends and I.”

“I still carry the bruises sustained from their beatings on my face,” she said. “I still feel their pressure on my arm and my ribs still hurt.”

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, her mother described the ordeal as “the worst day of my life, as if the world has ended for me”.

Rules are enforced by thousands of visible and undercover religious or “morality” police, who patrol the streets to check for violations.

Women found to have their hair or bodies inadequately covered can be publicly admonished, warned, fined or even arrested, while vigilantes are also active.

This is why any discussion of a moderate Iran under its current leadership is simply another case of “fake news.”

Laura Carnahan

Rebuilding the Global Coalition Against Iran

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Rebuilding the Global Coalition Against Iran

Rebuilding the Global Coalition Against Iran

The early days of the Trump administration have offered opponents of the Iranian regime hope that a significant change in U.S. policy towards the Islamic state will presage a similar shift in global opinion towards the mullahs in Tehran.

If we reset back to when the first talks took place over Iran’s nuclear program, the unity amongst the international community was one of the hallmarks of forcing the regime to the bargaining table in the first place.

Three consecutive American presidential administrations imposed ever growing harsh sanctions on the regime. Coupled with the sinking Iranian economy due to gross mismanagement and corruption, the regime was brought to the bargaining table in a position of weakness. The mullahs recognized this in rigging a presidential election to install Hassan Rouhani as a benevolent “moderate” face following the much-reviled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Unfortunately, instead of seizing the opportunity to effect significant changes to the regime’s conduct—especially its brutal human rights record and support for terrorism—the P5+1 group of nations, led by the Obama administration, picked the appeasement policy as its policy forward and folded like a cheap suit in caving to regime demands.

Gone were any restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program. Say goodbye to improving human rights within Iran. Forget about stemming the flow of terrorism around the world.

The opportunity to solve so many troubling problems through the single chance to make change within the Iranian regime was missed and for the past six years the world has paid a heavy price for that oversight.

While Iran lobby supporters such as the National Iranian American Council have been busy trumpeting the “wins” from the agreement, cities around the world have witnessed a much more dismal result.

Paris, Ottawa, Brussels, Sydney, Nice, Berlin, San Bernardino, Boston and Orlando are only some of the cities subjected to Islamic extremist terror, but far worse has been the whole sale slaughter committed in places such as Aleppo at the hands of Iranian regime forces.

Now with the Trump administration in place with the first encouraging signs of reversing the flow of moves aimed at appeasing the regime to one that is more confrontational and accountable, the diplomatic board has been reset with a fresh opportunity to rebuild that global coalition that was so effective before.

Reassembling a global consensus against the Iranian regime will be difficult, but it is achievable. The first promising signs have come from a Trump administration that has found prominent policy making positions for noted and vocal critics of the regime, including Mike Pompeo at the Central Intelligence Agency, Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and James Mattis as Secretary of Defense.

There has also been a unifying response from Iran’s neighbors, especially Arab nations who have been subjected to the prospect of terror attacks and outright war, including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Their inclusion in any global consensus building against Iran will be vital.

Also, unlike the prior administration, the Iran lobby has been frozen out of the equation and does not have the same access it enjoyed previously into the White House and State Department. White House visitor logs are unlikely to show the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi traipsing through the West Wing anymore.

Already, we have seen some possible signs of the Trump administration’s efforts to rebuild a relationship with Russia and drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. Of course, separating the two may prove unachievable, but it does set the scenario for Trump to engage in some old fashioned horse trading in which the Vladimir Putin might be induced to give up his support for Iran in exchange for something else.

An editorial by a scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, offered some thoughts on how Russia might be persuaded to change its support for Iran in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

“What, then, is the best American strategy? Iran continues its campaign against the U.S., and it won’t end so long as the regime endures. Therefore American policy must rely on dismantling the Khamenei regime as peacefully as possible, perhaps from the inside out,” the editorial writes.

“Antiregime demonstrations erupt in Iran all the time, and most experts believe the vast majority of Iranians detest Mr. Khamenei and his henchmen. With U.S. support, these millions of Iranians could topple the Islamic Republic and establish a secular government resembling those in the West,” he adds. “With the Islamic Republic gone, the Trump administration would be in a much stronger position to strike a deal with Mr. Putin. The road to Moscow runs through Tehran.”

The more troublesome part of any international coalition might be getting a unified Europe which has responded to the lifting of economic sanctions on Iran with an unbridled rush to tap Iranian markets. Who can forget the parade of EU officials leading trade delegations to Tehran in the aftermath of the deal while Iranian men, women and children were being publicly executed.

Even after the swelling in terrorist attacks and flood of refugees fleeing the Iranian-caused Syrian civil war, some European leaders still seem to be adopting a position of bowing to Iranian regime demands.

One such example was the much-criticized visit of the Swedish trade minister in which she and the female members of her delegation wore hijab coverings and met with Hassan Rouhani and an all-male team.

The irony of the photo opportunity was not lost on many human and women’s rights groups.

Considering that previous state visits to Saudi Arabia by female leaders such as Michelle Obama and German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen publicized their decisions to forgo wearing traditional head coverings, the willingness to acquiesce to Iranian demands is deeply troubling.

We can only hope that the rest of Europe realizes that winning a few dollars isn’t worth empowering more terrorism.

Laura Carnahan