'Smart sanctions' key to reining in mullahs

'Smart sanctions' key to reining in mullahs

Published Date: 07 June 2009

By Struan Stevenson

THIS week, Iran's Supreme Leader will have a chance to "elect" the person he favours to lead the Islamic Republic. For, unlike democratic Europe, Iran is ruled by theocratic dictators and, as such, the polls there are a farce.
The fundamentalist mullahs are brutally suppressing the people of Iran. Thousands are on death row and Iran is recognised as the most prolific executioner of minors, having judicially murdered dozens over the past three years. Last month, it hanged elara Darabi, a talented young female artist, for an alleged a crime that she had denied committing at the age of 17.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, more than 120,000 political prisoners have been executed. The regime uses more than 170 forms of physical and psychological torture, including public hangings, stoning to death, amputation of limbs, eye gouging and draining prisoners' blood.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is Supreme Leader Khamenei's favourite to continue as president, has also ordered a crackdown on universities and women. Nearly a million Iranians were harassed on the street by security forces last year. None the less, Iranian universities have been a hotbed of student activism and protests, and Iranians held 8,000 anti-government rallies last year. Last month, several hundred teachers chanted "death to the dictator" at a Tehran rally in defiance of the regime's feared security apparatus.

Despite the atmosphere of heightened repression, millions of Iranians demand the freedoms offered by the country's parliament-in-exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and its president-elect Maryam Rajavi, whom I co-chaired the Friends of a Free Iran inter-group with and invited to the European Parliament on several occasions, to act as the voice of those millions yearning for change.

Ahmadinejad had once promised to bring oil revenues to the dinner table of poor Iranians'. He promised to eradicate poverty and tackle unemployment.

In office, he handed lucrative contracts to cronies, including his former colleagues in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Under his watch, the official level of Iran's annual inflation rate reached 29.4 per cent and the price of food items increased on average by two to five times.

Rather than work to solve the people's financial woes, Iran spends billions of dollars annually on its illicit nuclear weapons programme and sends money to terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, to derail the fragile Middle East peace process.

Ever since the NCRI blew the whistle on Iran's nuclear sites at Natanz and Arak in 2002, European leaders have wasted time trying to negotiate with the regime and offering countless incentives.

European Union officials pinned hope on behaviour change and moderation on the part of the mullahs. But, moderation of Iran's fundamentalist regime is only a mirage. The mullahs ignored countless incentives.

EU leaders have to face the reality that the regime is interested in negotiations only to buy time to press ahead with its nuclear projects. The mild sanctions currently in force are having little effect, not least because the EU continues to remain Iran's biggest trading partner. But time is now running out.

Fortunately, under the Obama administration, the prospects of US military airstrikes are off the table. But, the EU's current policy of appeasing the regime has had the effect of making it more brazen in its unlawful behaviour.

At a time when Iranians are yearning for change, Rajavi says the EU should extend a hand of friendship. Comprehensive, smart sanctions are needed to target the mullahs' economic lifeline. This should be coupled with western support for democratic change by the Iranian people and their organised Resistance.

Hundreds of colleagues at the European Parliament have since declared their support for this "third option", signalling that the people of Europe stand on the side of the millions in Iran who seek freedom. EU leaders should start acting fast.

We should count ourselves lucky that we have a free and fair election process in Europe; it is something of a distant dream in Iran.

For the past five years Struan Stevenson has been co-chair of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup in the European Parliament. He is standing for re-election to the parliament

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/world/39Smart-sanctions39-key-to-reining.5342089.jp

A predator becomes more dangerous when wounded

Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world.

In the cold war-like mentality in Washington, Tehran is portrayed as the pinnacle in the so-called Shia crescent that stretches from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, through Shia southern Iraq and Syria. And again unsurprisingly, the "surge" in Iraq and escalation of threats and accusations against Iran is accompanied by grudging willingness to attend a conference of regional powers, with the agenda limited to Iraq.

Presumably this minimal gesture toward diplomacy is intended to allay the growing fears and anger elicited by Washington's heightened aggressiveness. These concerns are given new substance in a detailed study of "the Iraq effect" by terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, revealing that the Iraq war "has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide". An "Iran effect" could be even more severe.

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources.

Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilise Iran from within. The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up - in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran's oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.

Threat escalation also serves to pressure others to join US efforts to strangle Iran economically, with predictable success in Europe. Another predictable consequence, presumably intended, is to induce the Iranian leadership to be as repressive as possible, fomenting disorder while undermining reformers.

It is also necessary to demonise the leadership. In the west, any wild statement by President Ahmadinejad is circulated in headlines, dubiously translated. But Ahmadinejad has no control over foreign policy, which is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US media tend to ignore Khamenei's statements, especially if they are conciliatory. It's widely reported when Ahmadinejad says Israel shouldn't exist - but there is silence when Khamenei says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine, calling for normalisation of relations with Israel if it accepts the international consensus of a two-state settlement.

The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless. Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.

In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington's response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer. The following year, the EU and Iran reached an agreement that Iran would suspend enriching uranium; in return the EU would provide "firm guarantees on security issues" - code for US-Israeli threats to bomb Iran.

Apparently under US pressure, Europe did not live up to the bargain. Iran then resumed uranium enrichment. A genuine interest in preventing the development of nuclear weapons in Iran would lead Washington to implement the EU bargain, agree to meaningful negotiations and join with others to move toward integrating Iran into the international economic system.

© Noam Chomsky, New York Times Syndicate