In the Monty Python skit, a
man brings a parrot back to the store where he purchased him half an
hour earlier, complaining that the parrot is dead.
The shop owner insists it must be resting, but the man says he
discovered that the only reason that parrot was sitting up at all was
because it had been nailed to the perch in its cage.
Like the shop owner, the State Department is promoting a long-dead
policy of supporting "moderates" in Tehran, under the guise of
promoting "reform" and "change."
Not only is State making a monumental mistake: it has fallen for one
of the oldest tricks of Iran's clerical elite.
Over the past three years, President Bush has accumulated a
tremendous capital of goodwill with the Iranian people because of his
outspoken support for their struggle for freedom.
The president has made clear in private meetings with Iranian exiles
that his public statements were not mere rhetoric. He really meant it
when he called Iran part of an "axis of e"vil in his 2002 State of
the Union speech.
He meant every word he uttered after the regime disqualified some
2,400 candidates for parliamentary elections in February 2004 and he
said, "The United States supports the Iranian people's aspiration to
live in freedom, enjoy their God-given rights, and determine their
own destiny."
He meant it when he spoke to the Voice of America's Persian service
on August 17, 2004. "There is a significant diaspora here in the
United States of Iranian-Americans who long for their homeland to be
liberated and free. We're working with them to send messages to their
loved ones and their relatives, say[ing], 'Listen, we hear
your voice, we know you want to be free, and we stand with you in
your desire to be free.'"
And he meant it again when he addressed the Iranian people during his
State of the Union speech this year." Our nation hopes one day to be
the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran."
Somehow, that message hasn't made it over to Foggy Bottom.
At the State Department, where Condoleeza Rice has admirably pledged
to spend $85 million this year to support the pro-freedom movement in
Iran, careerists have taken over the show and are steering her in the
wrong direction.
Of that $85 million, nearly $50 million has been tentatively
ear-marked to expand the Voice of America and the Persian service of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Both radios need to improve the quality of their broadcasts and,
especially, their political content, before they deserve another dime
in taxpayer funding. But that is a story I will treat in depth in a
future column.
The rest of the money is being spent on a variety of programs led by
former Tehran regime officials, student leaders, and U.S. academics
who believe the Tehran regime can be reformed, but does not need to
be changed.
This is sweet music to the ears of Iran's ruling mullahs and to
Iran's boy president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
They all want "reform." After all, Ahmadinejad campaigned for
president on a platform of "reform." He was going to drive out
corrupt mullahs, such as the "reformist" Rafsanjani, and reform
Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Mohsen Sazegara was one of the founders of Iran's Revolutionary
Guards Corps. He fell out with the regime in the late 1980s,
published a series of reformist newspapers, and was jailed for nearly
two years.
He came to the United States last year at the invitation of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy and with the blessing of
the Department of State.
Sazegara's break with the regime was sincere. But since coming to the
United States, he has teamed up with "reformers" such as Akbar Atri,
Ali Afshari, and Ramin Ahmadi of Yale University, who have gotten the
lion's share of the "pro-freedom" moneys from the State
Department.
Instead of providing seed money to a home-grown pro-democracy
movement, State Department has sponsored Atri to go on a tour of U.S.
college campuses, and is now talking of providing him with a radio
station to broadcast his message of "reform" into Iran. They have
also thrown money at Ramin Ahmadi by the million - initially, to
sponsor a data base of Iranian human rights abuses (something that a
number of other groups had already pulled together privately over the
past decades, on shoestring funding).
It was Ahmadi who sponsored the ill-fated "non-violent training
workshops" in Dubai that backfired last year, sources familiar with
the program told me.
The idea of training Iranian activists in the weapons of non-violent
conflict is an excellent one. But as reported by the Washington Post,
the problem with the Dubai workshops was the choice of people who
were selected to attend.
They were reformers, not activists seeking to grow a pro-democracy
movement.
They didn't want to change the regime in Tehran; they wanted to make
it stronger, just as Iran's reformist clerics have sought to do. When
they found out that the State Department - and not Yale University -
was financing the workshops, they fled back to Tehran, where they
denounced the United States publicly.
Roozbeh Farahanipour was one of the leaders of the student rebellion
at Tehran University in July 1999. He remembers Ali Afshari well.
"When we tried to get students to take the demonstrations from the
university to the streets of Tehran, Afshari came along behind us in
a truck with a sound system, shouting at the crowd to not follow us
because we were against the revolution," Farahanipour recalls.
That is one of the tricks the regime likes to play. It periodically
gives leash to "reformers" and allows them to publish newspapers and
speak out against regime excesses, for as long as they don't cross
the red line and demand true freedom and a change of regime.
Several authentic, grass roots movements for change in Iran do exist.
One is led by Farahanipour and is called Marzeporgohar, or Iranians
for a Secular Republic (http://www.marzeporgohar.org
<http://www.marzeporgohar.org/> )
Another is the Iran Nation's Party (sometimes referred to as the Iran
People's Party in the West). It was led by Darioush Forouhar until he
and his wife were brutally hacked to death by regime thugs in Tehran
in November 1998. The current leader is Khosrow Seif.
Yet another authentic pro-democracy group worthy of U.S. funding is
the Iran Referendum Movement. Prompted initially by Sazegara's
campaign that collected 35,000 signatures on the Internet in favor of
an internationally-monitored referendum on the regime, the movement
now has chapters in 35 cities worldwide who sent 250 delegates to a
founding convention in Brussels, Belgium, this past December.
They elected a 15-member Central Committee, who in turn selected a
7-member Executive Board. Although they have extensive networks
inside Iran, they can't seem to get the eyes and ears of the State
Department.
But because the Referendum Movement is calling for an end of the
Islamic Republic, the groups being funded by the State Department
have all refused to have anything to do with it. The State
Department's choices are reformers, not revolutionaries.
Sazegara himself told me last year that the reform movement was
"dead." And yet, the State Department, through lack of imagination or
its atavistic tendency toward blind man's bluff, refuses to recognize
it.
Like Monty Python's dead parrot, the State Department Iran "experts"
have nailed the reform movement to the perch, and keep selling it
again and again, pretending that it's alive.
But no matter how they dress it up, it's still a dead parrot.
Or, as the Monty Python character put it, "This parrot is no
more!& 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil,
run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS
IS AN EX-PARROT!!"
Alas, not in Washington.
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