Seyed Hossein Mousavian

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

February 14, 2018 by admin

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

January 25, 2018 by admin

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

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

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

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

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

What have the mullahs done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mousavian clinches the irony trophy when he writes:

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

What Happens If the Iran Nuclear Deal Stays?

October 5, 2017 by admin

President Donald Trump has been beset by a tumultuous September and now October with hurricanes battering Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, North Korean belligerence and the horrific massacre in Las Vegas. No one would question that the burdens of being president right now are great

But President Trump faces a self-imposed Oct. 15^th deadline as well to decide what he wants to do with the Iran nuclear deal, which he has previously described as a terrible deal and with that decision comes a whole new raft of challenges.

In many ways, he has options that other presidents would not have since he comes at this point with essentially a clean slate. He can take several options such as continuing to certify the Iranian regime in compliance with the deal, but continuing to hold the mullahs over a proverbial cliff edge; threatening to pull out at any time. The agreement’s renewal window gives him the opportunity to continually threaten the mullahs.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered that the president would have multiple options in addressing the Iranian conundrum.

What is clear though is that while the nuclear agreement is being widely hailed by the Iran lobby and regime supporters as a success, the issues many critics and even the president have with it is that the deal was too narrow and gave a free pass to the regime on a whole host of issues such as development of ballistic missiles that were nuclear-capable.

Much of the instability the Middle East is experiencing has its central roots planted in Iranian soil where the mullahs have sought to use their Revolutionary Guards and Quds Forces to actively initiate and carry out military conflicts on multiple fronts, including Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Those militant acts drew the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia into armed conflict and pitched the world dangerously closer to global confrontation.

The funneling of cash to the Assad regime in Syria and terrorist operations such as Hezbollah and Shiite militias in Iraq have been a fundamental reason for why sectarian conflicts have sprouted all around the world like noxious weeds.

The mullahs have always viewed the use of funded third-parties as a legitimate tool of state-craft, which is why Iran has consistently been at the top of the U.S. State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism.

But not only has Iran’s foreign policy been a source of consternation for the world, but its internal domestic policies have also fueled this militancy because the nuclear deal left in place all of the mechanisms of the theocratic regime and provided no boost or reprieve from embattled democracy and dissident advocates within Iran.

If anything, the deal only emboldened Hassan Rouhani and his puppet master, Ali Khamenei, to crack down even harder on internal dissident with impunity; leaving human rights within Iran shambles and subjecting the Iranian people to enormous hardship and deprivation.

Dissident groups such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran have long documented the steep, downward spiral of human rights in Iran since the nuclear deal was agreed to and lack of movement within Iran.

This disconnect between the nuclear deal and lack of any inclusion of restrictions on Iran beyond the very narrow scope centrifuges and uranium explains much of what has gone terribly wrong with Iran. In many ways, its failures mirror the failures of efforts to control North Korea whose own flawed nuclear agreements served as the templates for the Iran deal.

What is clear though is that the Iran lobby is working feverishly to frame the debate of a post-deal world as being an abysmal one for the U.S.

Take for example an editorial in the Los Angeles Times by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a Princeton University scholar and a former Iranian regime official, in which he portrayed Rouhani’s 2013 election as an act of moderation now threatened by the nuclear deal’s demise.

Mousavian neglects to note Rouhani’s re-election against the backdrop of President Trump’s widely publicized views on the nuclear deal. If “hardliners” in Iran were empowered by the president’s rhetoric, then by Mousavian’s own standards, Rouhani’s 2017 campaign should have gone down in flames.

But as a former regime official, Mousavian’s insights are pointless since they do little to illustrate any opinions contrary to the wishes of Khamenei and his mullah brethren. Indeed, it would be explosive if Mousavian voiced any criticism of the regime’s support for terrorism and its quick build-up of ballistic missiles as excuses the president is using to dump the deal.

If Mousavian was truly an agent for global peace efforts, he would have encouraged his former colleagues to abandon the most odious portions of the regime’s abuses to give the president less ammunition to derail the deal.

Mousavian’s lack of any discernible criticism in any area places him squarely in the camp of Iran loyalists.

“Because Trump has put the deal in his crosshairs, advocates of diplomatic engagement with the West in Iran are being discredited. If he goes ahead with his stated wish to undo it, a domestic consensus will form not to trust, negotiate or cooperate with the United States on any future issue,” Mousavian writes.

It’s a ludicrous statement to make since everybody knows that when it comes to Iranian regime’s policies, it’s the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei who makes all the decisions; and the rift between various rivals within the regime is due to the power struggle they have on who gets a bigger share. It’s long known that it’s the Iranian lobby’s narrative to advocate more dialogue with the regime, to strengthen the so-called moderates within the regime, whereas when it comes to the foreign policies of the regime, Iran has done more in support of terrorism during the “reformist” Rouhani’s tenure, in its meddling in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and in employing the Hezbollah and other extremist proxy forces in those countries, than his predecessor, hardliner Ahmadinejad. Likewise, human rights organizations reports show that under Rouhani, there have been a lot more executions than any of his predecessors in the past 25 years.

The reality is that the Iranian regime has squeezed everything it could get from the nuclear deal in terms of pallets of cash delivered by the Obama administration to a lifting of economic sanctions to allow foreign companies to broker deals.

Even if the president were to dump the deal, the reality is that very little would initially change except the rhetoric coming from Tehran and from supporters such as Mousavian.

Iran Regime Looks to Expand Into Latin America

June 22, 2016 by admin

Iran Regime Looks to Expand Into Latin America

In 1994, a Buenos Aires Jewish community center was bombed by terrorists. Speculation focused on the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah, as well as the long reach of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its specialized Quds Forces.

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman had doggedly pursued the investigation into the bombing, leading up to his indicting eight former Iranian regime officials and one Lebanese national in 2006. The following year, at Nisman’s behest, Interpol issued “red notices” for the arrest of six of the accused. But the Iranian regime predictably took no action.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Nisman’s efforts this week culminating to his death under suspicious circumstances when he died from a single gunshot to the head in January 2015, a day before he was scheduled to testify to Argentina’s Congress about an alleged government cover-up of the bombing.

Using legal wiretaps, Nisman later built a case that then-President Cristina Kirchner’s government had a covert agreement with Iran to wipe Tehran’s fingerprints off the AMIA attack, as the center was known, in exchange for Iranian oil and reopening Iran’s market to Argentine grain and beef.

Nisman had filed a criminal complaint against members of the Kirchner government the week before he died. Killing him did nothing to stop the public from learning of the contents of his report. Yet his death did put the brakes on his plan to bring the Iranian regime’s crime into the international arena. It had the potential to undermine the key foreign-policy objectives of Tehran, especially plans by the mullahs to engage the West in a nuclear agreement to lift economic sanctions.

The lifting of sanctions and the re-engagement of commercial activity is a crucial element to Tehran’s long-term plans since it allows the regime to deploy political and military operatives specializing in propaganda, intelligence, terrorism and insurgency to finance their illicit activities under the guise of normal everyday business.

Months after Nisman’s death, a safe-deposit box was discovered with a signed document by him formally requesting the United Nations to intervene in the investigation.

Joseph Humire, the executive director of the Washington, D.C., based Center for a Secure Free Society, uses thousands of documents and legal wiretaps released to the public to show how the prosecutor’s death eliminated a key stumbling block for Iran and “paved the way for [it] to move into a new phase of its information and intelligence operations in Latin America.” If the theocracy, which is the No. 1 state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, did not murder Nisman, it was the biggest beneficiary of his death.

The timing of Nisman’s death was thus critical as the Iranian regime entered intense negotiations by 2015 for a nuclear deal. An investigation in Argentina showing the regime’s culpability in terrorist acts abroad would severely damage the arguments being made by the regime and the Iran lobby that the incoming administration of Hassan Rouhani was only focused on peaceful and moderate accommodation with the rest of the world.

Authoritarian governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have welcomed the presence and influence of Iran, but Latin American countries have been surreptitiously invaded, beginning with embassies, cultural centers and mosques. Peru’s southern rural communities are typical targets for launching networks. Front companies in the beef and oil industries in Brazil and Uruguay are used to provide cover for Iranian regime’s operatives, according to Humire, who also cited the rise of Iranian mullahs’ infiltration of universities.

Surely the mullahs in Tehran see the opportunity and have aggressively moved to expand their influence in a region with a U.S. administration pursuing a policy of appeasing the regime.

The linchpin of those efforts remain the nuclear deal reached last year which is giving the Iranian regime the legal fig leaf to seek out commercial agreements providing it the opportunity to expand its influence throughout the world.

The situation in Argentina of suppressing a terrorist attack in exchange for business deals was a dark foreshadowing of what is happening today with recent announcements by companies such as Boeing in new agreements with the regime.

The nuclear agreement has been under severe criticism though with revelations and disclosures coming almost daily undercutting the arguments made by the Iran lobby and other regime supporters in favor of it. These include:

The promise of empowering Iranian “moderates” in upcoming elections, only to see the overwhelming majority of perceived moderates knocked off the ballot and hardliners in firm control of all leadership positions;
The promise that Iran would be an influence for peace in the region, but instead has widened the war in Syria, brought Russia into the fighting and started the civil war in Yemen, while boosting sectarian conflict in Iraq between Sunni tribes and Shiite militias; and
The promise of improving the plight of the Iranian people economically and in human rights, have been dashed as mass arrests and executions have reached an all-time high while the economy and standard of living in Iran have reached an all-time low.

But the Iran lobby continues to fight for the survival of the nuclear deal and by extension the survival of the regime’s leadership as evidenced by an editorial penned by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, former head of the Foreign Relations Committee of Iran’s National Security Council, and Reza Nasri, a scholar at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in the New York Times.

They predictably blamed the U.S. for not living up to its end of the nuclear agreement bargain by keeping in place sanctions not related to the nuclear program, but instead human rights violations and sponsorship of terrorism, thereby threatening to undermine Iranian confidence in the deal.

In essence, they are saying the U.S. should be at fault if the mullahs walk away from the deal because it restricts their ability to fund terror.

It is an inane argument and one quickly losing its appeal as the spread of Islamic extremism from Iran now reaches into the Americas.

By Michael Tomlinson