Iran Lobby

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

Devastating Report Shows Obama Blocked Hezbollah Sting

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Devastating Report Shows Obama Blocked Hezbollah Sting

Devastating Report Shows Obama Blocked Hezbollah Sting

Politico published a devastating story of how the Obama administration derailed a Drug Enforcement Administration operation aimed at Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based, Iranian-backed terrorist group, which used trafficking in drugs and weapons to fund its operations, in order to prevent jeopardizing the Iran nuclear deal.

The blockbuster revelation came in an exhaustive three-part series by Politico’s Josh Meyer who delved deep into Hezbollah’s criminal and terrorist operations, its support from the Iranian regime and the Obama administration’s desperate moves to keep the DEA’s investigation from jeopardizing a flawed nuclear deal alive.

Known as Project Cassandra, the DEA’s extensive campaign was aimed at toppling the terrorist group’s elaborate network smuggling and selling narcotics and weapons around the world; whose profits were used to fund the terror network worldwide.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, who helped establish Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst in 2008, told Politico. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

When Project Cassandra leaders, who were working out of a DEA’s Counter facility in Chantilly, Virginia, sought an OK for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, Justice and Treasury Department officials delayed, hindered or rejected their requests, according to Politico.

Project Cassandra members said Obama officials blocked or undermined their efforts to chase down top Hezbollah operatives, including one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers who was also a top supplier of conventional and chemical weapons used by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his own citizens.

Former Obama administration officials told Politico their decisions were guided by improving relations with Iran, stalling its nuclear weapons program and freeing four American hostages held by the country.

According to Politico, the DEA followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

It is ironic that the other countries involved in the smuggling operation include countries such as Venezuela who is closely tied to the Iranian regime.

It is even more ironic that the Iran lobby has been deaf, dumb and mute on the disclosures since they fly directly in the face of the claims made by Iran advocates such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council who extolled the virtues of the nuclear deal as a moderating force within Iran and throughout the Middle East, but now we know that the promise of the deal in fact persuaded the Obama administration to give Hezbollah a free pass in shipping narcotics to Western nations and arms to proxies who later used them in conflicts stretching from Syria to Yemen to Nigeria.

The Obama-led Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested, according to Politico.

In hindsight, the Obama administration’s Pollyanna-ish view of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah since at best naive, and at worst deliberately obstructive.

Obama’s then CIA director, John Brennan, even recommended that Obama “has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system.”

The logic that believed the mullahs in Tehran could be trusted to act in a civilized manner also seemed to guide the belief that Hezbollah could be assimilated into a normal political party in war-torn Lebanon.

The disclosure that Brennan actually believed that “moderate elements” within Hezbollah could be cultivated is a shocking echo of the same arguments made about empowering “moderate elements” within the Iranian regime through a negotiated nuclear agreement.

It is clear now that the pervasive idea of appeasement was hatched almost from the day President Obama was sworn into office and guided U.S. policy moving forward and eventually set the stage for the carnage and bloodshed Iran has unleashed over the past three years.

Politico cited the example of Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, who was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014.

But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

Fayad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of planning the murders of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.

We know that the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement has been a complete failure in reining in Iranian extremism. It has made the world a much more dangerous place and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

We can only hope that the Politico story revelations will serve as a harsh reminder for the Trump administration not to make the same mistakes.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Shows its Hypocrisy in Latest Attacks on US

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Iran Lobby Shows its Hypocrisy in Latest Attacks on US

Iran Lobby Shows its Hypocrisy in Latest Attacks on US

The recent media speculation over U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s alleged precarious employment status has given rise to a cottage industry overnight of second-guessing by various talking heads and analysts over what a potential change at Foggy Bottom might look like in terms of future US policy.

The Iran lobby, specifically the National Iranian American Council, was swift to jump on the bandwagon and raise the specter of a push by “neocons” to put one of their own into the seat and go to war against the Iranian regime.

The focus of that smear attack was Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) who has been a vocal critic of the Iranian regime, especially the nuclear agreement.

It serves the Iran lobby’s purposes to push the narrative that Trump administration’s primary focus is to somehow foment a war with Iran; even though no administration official—from the president on down—has never even hinted at such an outcome, let alone advocated it.

The narrative though helps the Iran lobby by feeding into the fear factor it has long used in warning against taking any aggressive actions to restrain the mullahs in Tehran. Remember how during the run up in negotiations over the nuclear agreement how the NIAC and its allies pushed the image of a war between Iran and the US as the reason for completing the deal?

The Iran lobby has always used fear mongering as a PR tactic and in the case of Secretary Tillerson, it is going all out to push it again.

The best example was an editorial authored by Trita Parsi and Ryan Costello of the NIAC on its website with the provocative headline of: “Cotton, Pompeo and Trump are a Recipe for War with Iran.”

Hyperbole aside, Parsi and Costello argue a scenario where Tillerson is replaced by current CIA director Mike Pompeo and he is replaced at the intelligence agency by Cotton. Of course Parsi and Costello offer no proof for such a scenario other than a vague “reported plan.”

There is no better example of trolling fake news than what Parsi and Costello are doing.

They go on to recite a history of Pompeo and Cotton’s record—which is already well known—of their doubts about the Iran nuclear deal and of the ability to rein in Iranian extremism, but couch it in a way to convey the idea that both are some crazed blood thirsty war mongers.

“What of the man that Pompeo would replace, Rex Tillerson? It is indisputable that Tillerson has been a disaster on many fronts, in particular, his campaign to gut the State Department which will do untold damage to American diplomacy for years to come. Yet, on the Iran nuclear deal, Tillerson has actually allied with Secretary of Defense James Mattis to urge Trump against ripping up the deal. The loss of Tillerson, combined with Cotton’s elevation, would mean that Pompeo and Cotton could face little resistance in their campaign to unravel a nuclear accord that is working and downplay the likely alternative ― war,” Parsi and Costello write.

In the twisted little world that Parsi and Costello are trying to fabricate, they stick to the logic that unraveling the nuclear accord can only lead to war; a preposterous idea when considered alongside the reality of since the deal was passed.

In the wake of the Iran nuclear deal, the Middle East has devolved into a region-wide war zone due largely to actions by Tehran, including the bloody civil war in Syria that sent four million refugees flooding across Europe and another sectarian uprising in Yemen that now threatens to bring Saudi Arabia into direct conflict with Iran.

Far from producing a peaceful world, Iranian regime has been at the epicenter of some of the worst conflicts taking place now; a far cry from the absurdist claims made by Parsi and Costello.

Of course, neither ever takes Tehran to task for supporting those wars, nor for its North Korean-like fanatical support for developing ballistic missiles; a point reinforced by a regime spokesman in denouncing comments made by French president Emmanuel Macron criticizing the missile expansion program.

“French official, other officials, who want to speak about Iran’s affairs need to pay attention to the deep developments that have come to pass in the region in past decades and the big changes between the current situation and the past,” said Bahram Qassemi, regime foreign ministry spokesman, according to state media.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely not negotiate on defense and missile issues,” he added.

Tension between Iran and France increased last month when Macron said that Iran should be less aggressive in the region and should clarify its ballistic missile program. His foreign minister also denounced, during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Iran’s “hegemonic temptations.”

France’s criticisms only echo those made by then-candidate Donald Trump and his current administration’s positions, and yet Parsi and Costello avoid criticizing the French on the same issue.

The hypocrisy of their positions is readily apparent as they fabricate Tillerson’s potential demise in order to create a false narrative, but not apply the same standard in criticizing the much-more revealing truth behind Iranian actions over the past four years.

Pompeo and national security adviser HR McMaster spoke at length about Iranian expansion in “weak states” in the Middle East at the 2017 Reagan National Defense Forum in California this weekend.

Pompeo confirmed he sent a letter recently to Maj. Gen Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s foreign operations arm or Quds Force.

“I sent a note. I sent it because he had indicated that forces under his control might in fact threaten US interests in Iraq,” Pompeo said.

“He refused to open the letter. It didn’t break my heart to be honest with you. What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we will hold he and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control. We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.”

Far from being a call to war, Pompeo’s effort to reach out to Soleimani only illustrated the focus of the Trump administration to rein in Iranian expansionism, not start a shooting war.

If there are any real war mongers here, they live in Tehran, not Washington.

Michael Tomlinson

Why Iranians Have Little to be Thankful For

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Why Iranians Have Little to be Thankful For

Why Iranians Have Little to be Thankful For

With Thanksgiving looming in the U.S., millions of Americans will gather around family dining rooms to enjoy holiday traditions such as consuming enormous quantities of food, watching football games on television and parents chiding their children for spending all their time posting on social media or surfing the internet.

It’s a time that reinforces the American traditions of family and freedoms that many others around the world do not get an opportunity to enjoy; namely ordinary Iranians living under the brutal repression of the Iranian regime.

Since the ruling mullahs stole the prospect for democracy away from the Iranian people after the Shah was deposed and the revolution turned into a religious theocracy, Iranians have simultaneously lived two lives: One in the public spotlight where the mullahs demand obedience to their strict religious views unable to express themselves; while they live another life in secret where Iranian women ride bicycles and teenagers post selfies on Instagram disobeying strict dress codes.

The normal everyday pleasures and freedoms Americans take for granted are almost universally restricted in Iran under the rule of the mullahs, which is why it has been important for American policy to make a distinction between the plight of the Iranian people and the policies of the oppressive regime.

The Iran lobby, led by such staunch advocates of the regime such as the National Iranian American Council, have always sought to portray American policies towards Iran as being harmful and punitive towards the Iranian people.

This was never more exemplified than in the long debate over U.S. sanctions aimed at Iran because of the regime’s support for terrorism and its secret nuclear development program.

NIAC leaders such as Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi went out of their way to try and link the suffering of the Iranian people of the alleged hardships imposed by these economic sanctions.

Fortunately, history has a way of clearing up the facts from the fiction and in the case of the Iranian regime’s conduct, the last several years have shown the truth about the regime’s oppressive policies and the dramatic impacts it has had on the lives of its citizens.

Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the complete ineptitude with which the mullahs run their government.

Iran has regularly placed near the bottom of rankings for lack of transparency in government and public corruption. The mullahs and their allies in the Revolutionary Guard Corps control virtually all of the major industries and siphon enormous amounts of profits into family bank accounts to live lavish lifestyles or divert it away from the economy for proxy war efforts in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen.

The draining of capital has slowed the Iranian economy to a snail’s pace over the years and widened the gap between the privileged and the impoverished. A startling and shocking photographic essay recently revealed the depths of Iranian misery in showing how many of Tehran’s poorest and most destitute have resorted to making homes in the empty plots at nearby cemeteries.

The mismanagement of water policy has led to record droughts and the evaporation of historic lakes and turned verdant farmland into desert wastelands, while the lack of available jobs to women has wiped out nearly half of the available workforce for a country struggling with deep unemployment; especially among young people who are often drafted to serve as cannon fodder in the mullahs’ wars.

Even recent natural disasters such as the massive earthquake striking the Iran-Iraq northern border killing over 530 people and wiping out 30,000 homes are a testament to how badly run the regime’s emergency response is to this day.

Seven days after the earthquake took place, regime’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei, visited the devastated areas and expressed that he was “not satisfied” with the response and said officials needed to “redouble their efforts.” This was considered widely an attempt to respond to the wide spread anger against the mullahs’ carelessness in the aftermath of the earthquake.

His remarks are ironic given how he personally controls much of the Iranian economy, as well as personally selects many of the top provincial officials who have so far badly bungled the disaster response.

In many ways, the Iranian people ought to be viewed with admiration since they have suffered incredibly, but still find ways to voice their discontent in a myriad of ways that displays the optimism and hope they all have for a free Iran in the future.

In a nation where public dissent of any kind is often a sure sentence to prison and even a public hanging, ordinary Iranians resourcefully find ways to express their dissatisfaction.

During the recent presidential elections which unsurprisingly saw Hassan Rouhani re-elected, most Iranians simply stayed away from polling places to express their unhappiness; forcing the regime to manufacture fake ballots to justify election returns.

Some of the more daring among the population even took to unfurling banners and signs on overpasses and the sides of building expressing support for banned leaders of the outlawed Iranian resistance movement such as Mrs. Maryam Rajavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella group comprising several dissident groups.

Ultimately, the message that Americans will celebrate this week with Thanksgiving, may soon be a message that will resonate throughout Iran when a future comes that allows for peaceful regime change and the downfall of the mullahs at the hands of the Iranian people who have grown tired of their restricted freedoms, unpleasant economic future and constant war-footing.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Regime Pushing Saudi Arabia to Brink of War

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Iran Regime Pushing Saudi Arabia to Brink of War

Iran Regime Pushing Saudi Arabia to Brink of War

Over the weekend, Iranian regime-backed Houthi rebels lobbed a missile at the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh from Yemen in what is being described as an “act of war” by Saudi officials by the Iranian regime.

While tensions have long simmered between Saudi Arabia and Iran—rising to a boiling point with confrontations between the two in the Syrian civil war and Yemen—this is the marks the first-time theater-wide weapons have been introduced aimed at either countries’ capitals.

“We see this as an act of war,” said Adel Jubair, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, in a CNN interview. “Iran cannot lob missiles at Saudi cities and towns and expect us not to take steps.”

This latest provocation seems to be part of the larger chess game being played out between the two countries that includes clashes in Lebanon and Iraq as Saudi Arabia seems determined to step up to the plate and blunt the Iranian regime’s expansionist moves over the past several years as part of an effort to build a Shiite sphere of influence controlled by Tehran.

The two countries had only recently appeared to be working towards a rapprochement offered by the Iranians only to see the regime launch proxy military efforts in backing Houthi rebels in Yemen and using Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon in Syria; both moves seemingly aimed at isolating and diminishing Saudi influence.

The missile launched by the Houthis was intercepted before reaching the capital and while causing no damage, pushed the region dangerously closer to all-out war between the two countries.

The move by Iranian regime to allow such an act underlines how vastly stupefying promises were made earlier by Iran supporters and advocates such as the National Iranian American Council two years ago during negotiations over the Iran nuclear agreement that passage of the deal would embolden moderate forces within Iran and usher in a more moderate and stabilizing Iran.

It’s worth noting again how utterly wrong people such as Trita Parsi of the NIAC have been since then.

While it may be eminently satisfying to call out Parsi and his cohorts on how blatantly obvious it was to simply be shilling for the mullahs, the ramifications of the PR push to essentially grant Tehran a hall pass to sow terror and conflict throughout the Middle East are coming home to bear poisonous fruit.

Far from accepting the blame and pushing for moderation from the mullahs in Tehran, Parsi and the NIAC have only doubled down by aggressively going after the Saudi regime with a spate of editorials, social media posts and statements blasting Riyadh for everything from manipulating the Trump administration’s policies towards Iran to conspiring with conservative Republicans to start to eradicate Iran.

On the surface, the NIAC’s claims are ludicrous, but given the dark history of complicity by it and its allies within the Iran lobbying machine, it’s no wonder that Tehran feels emboldened enough to start lobbing missiles at Saudi Arabia.

Jubair detailed how the missile was smuggled into Yemen in parts and assembled by Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps operatives and fired by Hezbollah from Yemen.

The fact that U.S., Saudi and other coalition naval warships have periodically caught Iranian fishing and commercial vessels smuggling weapons, ammunition and parts to Yemen from Iran have only strengthened these claims over the years of direct Iranian activity in the escalating war in Yemen.

Hezbollah’s participation is worrisome since the IRGC has often used the Lebanese-based terror group as its shock troops in conflicts such as Syria and in targeting U.S. service personnel over the past three decades around the world.

Earlier news disclosures of U.S. State Department cables published on WikiLeaks show that Yemen had acquired stockpiles of missiles from North Korea and that Iran may have shipped components of North Korean missiles to its Houthi allies who in 2015, with the support of Tehran, toppled the internationally-recognized government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi and now control much of the countryside since then.

This new-found “Axis of Evil” between Iran, North Korea and terror groups such as Hezbollah, point out the highly volatile nature of Iranian regime’s expansion plans and how it has built a formula for conquest around using terror groups and insurgents to destabilize a country and then move in to consolidate its power and use it as a base of operations to stage even more actions.

It is a model used effectively in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen and has gained traction in Iraq, but was stymied in the Gulf states by swift action by Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has called for an urgent meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo next week to discuss Iran’s intervention in the region, an official league source told Egypt’s MENA state news agency.

The call came after the resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister pushed Beirut back into the center of a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran and threatens to re-open that country to bloody conflict.

Even French President Emmanuel Macron is blaming Iran for the missile attack targeting Riyadh and said it illustrates the need for negotiations with Tehran over its missile development.

“The missile which was intercepted by Saudi Arabia launched from Yemen, which obviously is an Iranian missile, shows precisely the strength of their” program, Macron said late as he visited the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

“There are extremely strong concerns about Iran” among its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf region over the missile launch, and “there are negotiations we need to start on Iran’s ballistic missiles,” he said.

All this flies in the face of the false promises made by Parsi and the NIAC and demonstrates clearly why any reputable news organization should think twice before providing air time or space for them to make such disreputable claims.

Clearly the Iran lobby has become one of the largest machines churning out “fake news” today.

Michael Tomlinson

CIA Release of Osama bin Laden Files Shows Links to Iran

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CIA Release of Osama bin Laden Files Shows Links to Iran

CIA Release of Osama bin Laden Files Shows Links to Iran

U.S. intelligence officials have long suspected ties existed between the Iranian regime and Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network, even though Iran and its supporters in the Iran lobby have vigorously denied it.

Now the Central Intelligence Agency has released a trove of some 47,000 documents taken from bin Laden’s computer by U.S. special forces during the mission that killed the notorious terrorist leader in 2011 in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Within that document dump was a 19-page al-Qaeda report in Arabic showing how bin Laden looked towards Iran in an alliance against the U.S.

“Anyone who wants to strike America, Iran is ready to support him and help him with their frank and clear rhetoric,” the report reads.

The Associated Press examined a copy of the report released by the Long War Journal, a publication backed by the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank fiercely critical of Iran and skeptical of its nuclear deal with world powers. The CIA gave the Long War Journal early access to the material.

The material also included never-before-seen video of bin Laden’s son Hamza, who may be groomed to take over al-Qaida, getting married. It offers the first public look at Hamza bin Laden as an adult. Until now, the public has only seen childhood pictures of him.

Equally significant is the apparent location of the wedding: Iran. An analysis of the video from Long War Journal’s Thomas Joscelyn notes that Hamza bin Laden was technically in Iranian custody until 2010 but does not seem to regard himself as a prisoner in letters he wrote to his father. Furthermore, Hamza reported being mentored in the ways of jihad by several senior al-Qaeda men who were supposedly in detention in Iran.

Iranian regime officials have always vigorously denied any connection to al-Qaeda and consistently pointed to the alleged incarceration of al-Qaeda members as proof of the regime’s commitment against terrorism, but bin Laden’s own computer files shine a damning light on how false that narrative has been.

Among the most interesting revelations are details of Iran’s collusion with al-Qaeda and bin Laden’s citation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a formative influence on his political thought.

More clearly authentic are such items as bin Laden’s handwritten personal journal. The Long War Journal cites passages that indicate bin Laden hoped al-Qaeda could capitalize on the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings to expand its influence.

The document recovered from bin Laden’s system provides an extensive description of al-Qaeda’s collusion with Iran, as summarized by the Long War Journal:

The author explains that Iran offered some “Saudi brothers” in al Qaeda “everything they needed,” including “money, arms” and “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in exchange for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.” Iranian intelligence facilitated the travel of some operatives with visas while sheltering others. Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, an influential ideologue prior to 9/11, helped negotiate a safe haven for his jihadi comrades inside Iran.

But the author of the file, who is clearly well-connected, indicates that al Qaeda’s men violated the terms of the agreement and Iran eventually cracked down on the Sunni jihadists’ network, detaining some personnel. Still, the author explains that al Qaeda is not at war with Iran and some of their “interests intersect,” especially when it comes to being an “enemy of America.”

Bin Laden was clear that Iran was a major covert supporter of al-Qaeda, providing funds, shelter for al-Qaeda operatives, and communications infrastructure. Two U.S. intelligence officials characterized the newly-released documents to NBC News as “evidence of Iran’s support for al-Qaeda’s war with the United States.”

Iranian regime Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, chief Iranian architect of the nuclear deal with President Barack Obama, quickly denounced the documents as “fake news” selectively released by the CIA to “whitewash the role of U.S. allies in 9/11.”

Unfortunately for Zarif the documents are not a fabrication of the U.S. government, but rather come straight from the keyboard of one of Iranian regime’s terrorist partners.

This coincides with an account offered by the U.S. government’s 9/11 Commission, which said Iranian officials met with al-Qaeda leaders in Sudan in either 1991 or early 1992. The commission said al-Qaeda militants later received training in Lebanon from the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which Iranian regime backs to this day and has used as its primary military forces in the Syrian civil war.

U.S. prosecutors also said al-Qaeda had the backing of Iran and Hezbollah in their 1998 indictment of bin Laden following the al-Qaeda truck bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

“The relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that the Sunni-Shiite divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations,” the 9/11 Commission report would later say.

This is an important conclusion, made years ago, that drew the starkest line from al-Qaeda to the Iranian regime and discounted the messaging from the Iran lobby that Sunni and Shiite differences would keep Shiite Iran away from Sunni dominated al-Qaeda.

The reason why this now-proven fact is so important is because it is the exact same argument made to deny any connections between the Iranian regime and ISIS.

The unmistakable truth now with these disclosures is that the Iranian regime has been and remains the single largest supporter and partner of terror in the world and operates freely with any terrorist group aligned against the U.S.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Provokes Confrontation with US

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Iran Regime Provokes Confrontation with US

Iran Regime Provokes Confrontation with US

Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council has been a consistent and vocal supporter of the Iranian regime and its claims to want a pathway to peace. The lunacy of his comments has been laid bare repeatedly over the last two years since the Iran nuclear deal was signed and Iran plunged deeper into wars in Syria and Yemen.

Over the past two years the mullahs in Tehran have focused their efforts at saving the Assad regime in Syria and putting enormous pressure on Saudi Arabia through the Houthi rebellion in Yemen and attempting to destabilize the Gulf states with the smuggling of weapons and explosives.

They have also sought to expand Iran’s power through a rapid development of its ballistic missile program to increase the range and payload capacity to send an unmistakable threat to Europe, Asia and throughout the Middle East.

So far, the Iranian regime has been careful to focus its efforts and its most militant actions against traditional rivals such as Saudi Arabia or to keep allies in place such as Assad or continue cracking down on internal political dissent, but a new trend has emerged lately as Iran directs its provocations directly at the U.S.

Over the past few months, Iran has steadily been ratcheting up the pace and frequency of actions aimed directly at the U.S. and its forces, including running its warships at U.S. Navy ships and using drone aircraft to buzz U.S. forces. It has also loosened the reins on its militias in Syria to provoke U.S. forces there.

In the past, Iran’s Quds Force arm of its Revolutionary Guard Corps took a direct role in supplying IEDs to Shiite militia fighting in Iraq and targeting U.S. personnel. Estimates of over 1,000 American casualties were blamed on explosive devices manufactured by Quds Force personnel in Iran and Iraq, 500 Americans killed alone during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Iran most recently has been flying its drone aircraft dangerously close to U.S. ships in international waters, including close calls during flight operations by the USS Nimitz battle carrier.

There have now been 14 circumstances in 2017 in which unsafe interactions between the U.S. and Iranian maritime forces have occurred, the Navy said.

The increase in direct confrontations with the U.S. mirror the same tactics used by North Korea in its own ramp up in its missile program; leading many analysts to believe both rogue regimes are sharing the same playbook.

What is clear though is that these actions are not the type of actions a state interested in peace undertake as the NIAC has consistently claimed. The mullahs have essentially shed all pretense at showing the world a moderate veil and instead are flexing their muscle in a blatant attempt to trying to bully and strongarm their neighbors.

Coupled with the increase in missile testing comes news that Iranian mullahs are preparing send a naval flotilla to the Atlantic Ocean. This follows a move by the Iranian parliament to allocate an additional $609 million for its missile program and support of increased terror and proxy operations through the Quds Force.

“No military official in the world thought that we can go round Africa to the Atlantic Ocean through the Suez Canal but we did it as we had declared that we would go to the Atlantic and its Western waters,” Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari was quoted as saying over the weekend.

“We moved into the Atlantic and will go to its Western waters in the near future,” Sayyari said.

Iranian regime’s increasingly hostile behavior also follows a little-noticed United Nations report disclosing that Iran has repeatedly violated international accords banning ballistic missile work. Lawmakers in the U.S. Congress and some policy experts also believe that Iranian regime has been violating some provisions in the nuclear agreement governing nuclear-related materials, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

“Little-noticed biannual reporting by the UN Secretary General alleges that Iran is repeatedly violating these non-nuclear provisions,” Iran Watch, a nuclear watchdog group, reported on Monday.

“Thus far, the United States has responded to such violations with sanctions and designations of Iranian and foreign entities supporting Tehran’s ballistic missile development,” the organization found. “However, the U.N. and its member states have not responded. More must be done to investigate allegations of noncompliance and to punish violations of the resolution.”

Washington Free Beacon wrote that Iranian regime’s recent behavior shows the regime has not moderated since the nuclear deal was implemented. The Obama administration sold the deal in part on promises that it could help bring Tehran into the community of nations.

“Every time the Islamic Republic has cash, it chooses guns over butter,” told the Washington Free Beacon. “What the [nuclear deal] and subsequent hostage ransom did was fill Iran’s coffers, and now we see the result of that.”

“What [former President Barack] Obama and [former Secretary of State John] Kerry essentially did was gamble that if they funded a mad scientist’s lab, the scientist would rather make unicorns rather than nukes,” Washington Free Beacon continued. “News flash for the echo chamber: Iranian reformist are just hardliners who smile more. Neither their basic philosophy nor their commitment to terrorism have changed.”

Washington Free Beacon is right about how wrong the promises were made by the Iran lobby and Obama administration. We only hope it’s not too late to stop the mullahs and eventually start the process of regime change.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Tries Blackmail in Threatening Failed Nuclear Deal

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Iran Tries Blackmail in Threatening Failed Nuclear Deal

Iran Tries Blackmail in Threatening Failed Nuclear Deal

One of the key provisions of the Iran nuclear deal was an agreement to not include so-called “side issues” into the agreement such as the regime’s sponsorship of terrorism or any improvement in its human rights record.

The mullahs in Tehran knew they would instantly fail any of those litmus tests and fought hard to keep them out of the agreement, but in doing so they set themselves up for failure down the road when continued abuses would force the U.S. to act in levying new sanctions for terrorism support and Iran’s burgeoning ballistic missile program.

The mullahs found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. The nuclear agreement did not contain any language prohibiting economic sanctions on non-core nuclear issues per the mullahs’ demands so as the Trump administration and U.S. Congress imposed new sanctions the mullahs were left to cry foul without any basis to stand on.

The Iran lobby then went to work trying to stave off sanctions by pushing the message that these additional sanctions would threaten the “essence” of the agreement and cause its collapse leading to Iran building a nuclear arsenal.

Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council tried to blame President Donald Trump for the potential collapse of the deal and issued a statement that reeked of falsehoods commonly trotted out by the Iran lobby.

“It should now be clear that Donald Trump’s moves to violate and hold certification of the Iran nuclear deal in doubt are actively destabilizing the accord. Unfortunately, in response to Trump’s increasingly hostile rhetoric, as well as Congress’ moves to escalate sanctions, Iran is now warning that it has its own options to back out of the deal if the U.S. continues to undermine it,” Parsi said.

Let’s be clear: Iranian regime, not the U.S., is responsible for destabilizing the nuclear deal with their bloody war in Syria, efforts to sow insurrection in the Gulf states, and start launching ballistic missiles at a clip rivaling North Korea. The U.S. did nothing to inspire those acts and all those acts began actually years ago and under the Obama administration.

Also, the U.S. Congress and American electorate has had the luxury to see how the nuclear deal has turned out after two years and their answer has been overwhelmingly negative. While Parsi may try to affix blame on President Trump, the real culprits are in Tehran.

But Parsi didn’t stop there.

“We have repeatedly warned that President Trump’s beating of the war drum with Iran, even if confined to rhetoric, in addition to new Congressional sanctions and zero diplomatic outreach, could only produce negative consequences. Iran’s parliament has now voted to increase spending on its ballistic missile program and the IRGC in direct response to new sanctions on the country,” Parsi added.

Incredibly, Parsi tries to also blame the U.S. President for Iranian regime’s decision to ramp up its missile program; ignoring the fact the regime’s missile program was begun a decade ago with technology licensing agreements with North Korea and fully funded by illicit oil sales.

It is a blatant example of how the Iran lobby tries to rewrite history to protect the Iranian regime after it acts to toss away the international agreements it signs.

Regime president Hassan Rouhani did his part in warning the regime could quickly ramp up its nuclear program and achieve an advanced level if the U.S. continued its “threats and sanctions.”

Rouhani’s remarks to Iranian regime lawmakers were his most direct warning that the deal could fall apart and risked ratcheting up tensions with the United States.

While most media focused on Rouhani’s threats, virtually no one picked up on the key inconsistency he made which is that Iran could “quickly” build nuclear weapons. This simple declaration proves the biggest lie offered by the regime and Iran lobby supporters such as Parsi: the nuclear deal did not push back the much-debated “breakout” period for Iran to build a nuclear device.

“In an hour and a day, Iran could return to a more advanced (nuclear) level than at the beginning of the negotiations” that preceded the 2015 deal, Rouhani said.

The nuclear deal has been a complete and utter failure.

United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley issued a stern and forceful rebuke to Rouhani’s comments and accurately pointed out the problem with the arguments being made by the Iran lobby about saving the nuclear deal at all costs.

Haley said on Tuesday Iran must be held responsible for “its missile launches, support for terrorism, disregard for human rights, and violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions.”

“Iran cannot be allowed to use the nuclear deal to hold the world hostage … The nuclear deal must not become ‘too big to fail’,” Haley said in a statement, adding that new U.S. sanctions were unrelated to the Iran nuclear deal.

What is ironic in all this debating about Iran is how North Korea is widely reviled, heavily sanctioned and appropriately feared by the rest of the world over its ballistic missile program, but in the case of Iran’s missile program, the European Union has struggled to stay mute and not offend the mullahs.

Why does North Korea’s missile program drive the world to the brink of striking back, but in the case of Iran, many American partners refuse to criticize Iran?

Part of the answer lies in the Iranian regime’s aggressive efforts to open its markets to European firms to make investment and economic hamstring themselves from taking future action against Iran. Another explanation comes from EU policy makers who naively believe in the lies of the Iran lobby and hope for the best while ignoring the evidence of Iranian regime’s extremism.

Europe’s reaction is eerily similar to the reaction their predecessors had to the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

We can only hope the world doesn’t pay again for that same policy of appeasement.

Michael Tomlinson

Regime Change in Iran will Come from the People

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Regime Change in Iran will Come from the People

Regime Change in Iran will Come from the People

The passage of new economic sanctions against the Iranian regime and the signing of the legislation by President Donald Trump officially buried the Obama administration’s policies of trying to appease the mullahs in Tehran into trying to turn towards moderation.

The response from the Iran lobby was predictable with dire warnings of war and destruction being pedaled, but the reality is that the regime change being sought by the U.S. is not the regime change the Iran lobby is trying to portray.

One of the great misconceptions about the idea of regime change is that it must come about violently and it would be externally driven by outside forces such as the U.S. scheming to plot the overthrow of the mullahs by some armed insurrection or brutal invasion.

It serves the purposes of regime supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council to push the narrative that President Trump is itching for a war with Iran.

The reality though is much different. The president campaigned strongly on the platform that the Iraq invasion by the Bush administration was a mistake and worse yet, not planning for its aftermath was blunder.

Most historians would not find fault with that appraisal and apparently not many American voters did either. It would be ironic then for a president—who campaigned against more wars in the Middle East—to start of his administration with seeking to instigate a war with the region’s largest army in Iran.

Then again, logic was never a strong suit for regime advocates such as Parsi, which is why we see his messages for what they are: diversions.

There are efforts to divert attention from the real concerns the mullahs have and are constantly battling against which is the potential for their rule to end because of the desire of the Iranian people to want change.

History has proven that all dictatorial regimes fail eventually. No government can stand against the entropy that occurs by suppressing basic human rights, using fear as a means of intimidation and control, and world events that reshape the region around a regime.

More recently, the Arab Spring protests toppled firmly established autocratic governments throughout the Mediterranean and reshaped the Middle East radically and it did so without the violence of bloody revolution that accompanied the Iranian revolution for example in 1979.

Even the more recent election demonstrations of 2009 showed the Iranian regime clearly that the Iranian people were more than capable of toppling their reign and it probably scared them to death and like any reactionary totalitarian regime, the mullahs did what came naturally for them: they cracked down even harder.

They rigged the election for Hassan Rouhani in 2013 by clearing the field of any other candidates. The did the same thing during parliamentary elections, keeping control with an overwhelming majority of loyalists.

They arrested journalists, stepped up attacks on dissidents, seized satellite dishes, banned social media, imprisoned students and artists and expanded the size and reach of “morality” police forces to enforce order.

Under Rouhani’s first time, the use of the death penalty skyrocketed to all-time highs as gallows and cranes were busy throughout public squares in Iran hanging Iranian men, women and even youngsters.

Even under this onslaught, protests still flourished in Iran with Rouhani’s re-election earlier this year in which he was greeted by masses of protesters at some campaign stops that turned ugly. Regime change in Iran won’t come at the point of an American invasion. It will come from the shouts and marches of millions of Iranians in city streets throughout the country.

Which is why the imposition of sanctions by the Trump administration is an opening step to making regime change possible; not through the threat of war as the Iran lobby would you believe, but rather in the reapplication of pressures that nearly forced the mullahs to lose control prior to the nuclear deal.

If we recall, the stage set prior to the nuclear negotiations showed the Iranian economy was groaning under the onslaught of an economy that had been drained of cash through rampant corruption and the funding of proxy wars and terrorist operations.

Ordinary Iranians were struggling to make ends meet and dealing with diminished expectations as career paths were blocked and opportunities shrank. Iranian small businesses struggled to stay afloat, while dual-national Iranians coming back to visit relatives or conduct business were increasingly being arrested and thrown in jail for no reason other than to be used as hostage pawns by the mullahs.

The level of discontent only needed a channel to express itself and that venue is increasingly becoming the Iranian resistance movement through groups such as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) which has long been a thorn in the side of the mullahs.

Comprised of Iranians abroad and inside Iran, these dissidents and others, form the basis of the most viable option for Iranians looking for a change. Within Iran lies a strong core of supporters, even those Iranians who may not support the MEK specifically, but are more than willing to work towards regime change anyway.

A central platform to the Iranian dissident movement’s policies is a call for pluralistic and democratic change in a multi-party system. While the concept might seem perfectly ordinary to anyone living in a democratic society, it is anathema to the Iranian regime. The biggest threat to the mullahs is the very simple idea that the Iranian people might want a political choice other than the Islamic state created by the mullahs.

All of which leads us back to the original imposition of new sanctions by President Trump and the start of the process to designate the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. These actions place the mullahs back in the crosshairs of international scrutiny, but most importantly attempt to recreate the environment back from 2009-13 when four years of tumultuous change was being demanded by the Iranian people.

It is time for the U.S. government to support and recognize the various Iranian dissident and opposition groups and empower them to begin the process of regime change; peacefully.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby in Full Attack Mode Against Trump

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Iran Lobby in Full Attack Mode Against Trump

Iran Lobby in Full Attack Mode Against Trump

The Iran lobby is in full attack mode against President Donald Trump and it’s not a surprise. We predicted as early as last December that the Iran lobby would mobilize to block any moves made by the new Trump administration to curb Iranian regime excesses.

It did not matter what the administration did so long as it might be construed to make things more difficult for the mullahs in Tehran then it deserved fierce opposition from the Iran lobby.

To that end the Iran lobby’s chief architect, the National Iranian American Council, first turned its attention to the debate over immigration, since for the NIAC, it was a perfect opportunity to burnish its credentials as a progressive fighter for human rights. An ironic notion since it all but encourages Iran to abuse its own people by not voicing any opposition to the continued imprisonment, torture and execution of thousands of Iranians.

It then tried to attack the Trump administration over its escalation in Syria in the fight against ISIS and the Assad regime, but as they say in the Deep South, “that dog just wouldn’t hunt.”

The NIAC and its allies got little traction on that issue, especially in light of horrific scenes of chemical attacks by Assad forces on Syrian civilians and the increase of direct attacks on U.S.-backed forces by Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias.

The handwriting was on the wall that trying to defend Iran in Syria was a no-winner for the NIAC.

It then shifted back to familiar ground by pushing the idea that the president was actively seeking a war with Iran and looking for excuses to start one.

It’s a stupid notion since the provocations for starting a conflict with Iran are already abundant and excessive:

  • Iranian regime has detained American sailors and repeatedly made attack runs at several U.S. warships in international waters warranting the firing of warning shots;
  • They have falsely arrested and detained several American citizens;
  • Iranian regime has supported the smuggling of weapons and insurgents to U.S. allies in Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait—home to important U.S. military bases—in an effort to de-stabilize and topple those governments;
  • Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders have consistently made threats of attacks on U.S. personnel in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq and have used their Quds Force units to supply insurgents and militias with IEDs and weapons to target them;
  • Iranian regime has launched multiple missiles in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions with heavier payload capacity and extended ranges now long enough to strike throughout Europe, Africa and Asia;
  • Iran mullahs have used cash gained from the lifting of economic sanctions from the nuclear deal not for restarting a moribund economy, but rather to fund its wars in Syria and Yemen with the express purpose of destabilizing Saudi Arabia, the most important Arab ally the U.S. has in the region; and
  • Iranian regime has continued to escalate cyberattacks against U.S. financial institutions, commercial enterprises and infrastructure elements in a wide-ranging effort to de-stabilize the U.S.

Any of these actions, by themselves, would warrant a strong U.S. response and yet the NIAC and its cohorts in the “echo chamber” of Iranian regime support have always sought to portray the mullahs as some poor, defenseless lambs.

Take for example Mitchell Plitnick, a so-called policy analyst that has bounced around several progressive Jewish outfits and now finds a home as a frequent supporter of the Iranian regime.

He authored a recent editorial that appeared on the same day in noted Iran lobby mouthpiece, Lobelog, and +972 Magazine, that President Trump’s demand for more access for international inspectors to Iranian military bases for evidence of nuclear development work was a “red line” for the mullahs and would effectively kill the deal.

“Access to those sites was an Iranian red line during negotiations, and the agreement to omit that access from the deal was an important component in getting the deal done,” Plitnick writes.

It’s a stupid argument to make since he neglects to mention that Iran’s deep desire to keep its military bases off limits from inspection already created the high probability that Iran is cheating and conducting nuclear work in those safe zones.

Remember, in the ramp up of its nuclear program, which Iran always claimed never existed, the regime spread its development and research work across the vast deserts of Iran and buried them deep in fortified bunkers. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog, has never had a complete and thorough accounting of every potential nuclear site in Iran.

Also, Iran was allowed to scrub several sites clean with bulldozers in clearing tons of dirt and debris away before soil samples were taken by Iranians and handed over to the IAEA. Even then, particles of nuclear materials were still detected.

The position that Trita Parsi of the NIAC takes that the president is actively seeking to invalidate the nuclear agreement is false since the truth is that the nuclear agreement is largely being ignored by Iran already.

Also, he fails to note in his extensive press interviews this week that the president’s own State Department has certified Iran every 90 days even though it could have pulled the plug from the president’s swearing in.

All of which means, President Trump is not in a hurry to dump the nuclear deal as much as he is eager to find a plausible pathway for addressing all of the concerns he has with Iran including terrorism, human rights and ballistic missiles.

Parsi’s intense focus on the nuclear deal is yet another distraction to turn attention away from the most menacing aspects of Iran today which is its North Korean-like march to missile dominance.

That is the issue grabbing headlines and global attention and Parsi and his friends are desperate to turn the spotlight away.

Michael Tomlinson

Why Does the Iran Lobby Care About the Nuke Deal?

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Why Does the Iran Lobby Care About the Nuke Deal?

Why Does the Iran Lobby Care About the Nuke Deal?

The Iran lobby, including the National Iranian American Council and other groups, invested heavily in supporting the Iran nuclear deal. They lobbied for it, wrote editorials, sent out loads of press releases, made appearances on news programs, held meetings with elected officials and coordinated strategy with the Obama White House through countless meetings.

The Iran lobby ostensibly was doing all this in the name of peace and in support of a whole host of promised positives coming from its passage, including:

  • Bolstering moderate elements within the Iranian regime and aiding their cause in upcoming elections;
  • Shifting Iran back towards diplomacy and serving as a moderating force in a deeply destabilized Middle East;
  • Empower international inspectors to keep Iran under close scrutiny and push back its development of a nuclear weapon; and
  • Propel Iran’s re-entry in the community of nations and become a partner economically and politically with the world once again.

It was a nice idea and attractive to many in Congress. Unfortunately, like most good intentions, it fell flat on its face when confronted by the evil nature inherent within the ruling mullahs in Tehran.

The one thing everyone seemed to forget and the Iran lobby was careful to obscure was that the Iranian regime never really cared about a nuclear deal since the mullahs knew it would never halt their nuclear program, only postpone it slightly.

What they and their Iran lobbyist allies really cared about was the lifting of crippling sanctions that, more than anything else, was and still is the true goal of the regime and its allies.

Preserving the nuclear deal is not the real concern of the regime. It is the potential for the re-imposition of economic sanctions under a skeptical Trump administration and a reset back to 2012 in which the Iranian regime was on the verge of collapse and widespread dissatisfaction among the Iranian people still simmered from the violent crackdown on the 2009 democracy protests.

This is why the deal was crafted to preserve Iranian regime’s missile program and never take up the issues of human rights and terrorism since the mullahs had always planned to use the cash it received from the nuclear deal to jumpstart their ballistic missile program and keep the Assad regime afloat in Syria.

The mullahs and by extension the Iran lobby relied on the passiveness of the U.S. under Obama. As British politician Edmund Burke once famously said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

In this, the Iran lobby sought to dissuade action against Iran by promising a changed regime, but since none of that has happened and the situation throughout the Middle East has clearly gotten worse under the expansion of several proxy wars by Iran, the Iran lobby has shifted its tone and tactics to a much darker and fear-based message.

It now relies on the banging of war fears in trying to keep the nuclear deal alive as evidenced by the mounting PR push by groups such as the NIAC which put out a policy memo outlining how the Trump administration could undermine the nuclear agreement.

It is typically long-winded and rests its logic on the notion that President Trump can kill the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement by choosing not to certify the JCPOA or implementing “snap back” sanctions.

The NIAC memo then goes on to exhaustively explain the various steps the Congress would take in reviewing either action by the president.

What the NIAC does not discuss is the fact the Congress voted to pass new sanctions on Iran by stunningly huge bipartisan majorities that made clear no one actually believes in any of the promises made by the NIAC earlier.

Iranian regime has clearly become a threat not only to the U.S., but to the entire region as its ballistic missiles can now reach targets throughout Europe, Asia and Africa.

The NIAC briefing also glaringly misses the essential point of what is happening now which is the Iranian regime’s actions on human rights violations, sponsorship of terror and accelerating a missile program that will soon surpass North Korea is what is driving the debate about Iran; not the nuclear agreement.

But the NIAC hopes that focus on the JCPOA will deflect attention on these other areas where Iranian regime is so blatantly awful on right now. It is akin to pointing at the crack den and ignoring the building on fire right next to it.

You can see how the Iran lobby is trying to push issues such as terrorism and missiles off the front pages by talking about the nuclear deal, when the nuclear deal isn’t even the issue being debated by Congress and the Trump administration.

This is the “new” grand lie of the Iran lobby and its supporters. They hope that by focusing on the JCPOA and Iranian regime’s continued “compliance” with the agreement that mullahs’ regime in Iran is somehow still a good global citizen. The lobby never addresses the ballistic missile program or the threat it poses, especially with heightened concerns over North Korea. It also never deals with the horrific human rights violations Iranian regime and its IRGC has perpetuated in the Syrian conflict.

Unfortunately for the NIAC and other Iran lobby members, everyone has pretty much caught on to the lie and ignoring what they say which explains the overwhelming bipartisan push to target Iran.

For the NIAC, it quickly finds itself alone in Washington’s Beltway with few open supporters and even less leverage in trying to boost Iranian regime’s fortunes. It’s time for the NIAC to pack it in.

Michael Tomlinson