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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Iran's Next Revolution
On The Issues
June 2002
As part of its war on terrorism, the United States should help the people of Iran overthrow their rulers. The current leadership represses its citizens, sending special forces to attack and torture reform-minded Iranians, humiliating young women, and shutting down publications that report such atrocities. Outside of its borders, the regime has aided Palestinian and al Qaeda terrorists against Western democracies.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic and the central figure in the creation of modern Islamic terrorism, died in 1989 on the thirteenth day of Khordad, the third month of the Iranian calendar. Thirteen being a famously unlucky number, the Iranians celebrate Khomeini's death on the lucky fourteenth of Khordad, which was June 4. In honor of the great man, amid the obligatory chants of "Death to America! Death to Israel!" 167 top leaders of twenty-five terrorist organizations gathered in Tehran for a conference on "Support for the Intifada." They included the usual suspects, among them seven representatives from al Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, has been reported by local newspapers to be living in a remote region of Iran itself.
The terror summit comes at a time of considerable internal agitation and intense Iranian support for terrorist activities against the United States, Britain, and Israel. The country's internal problems catalyze its external violence. In late May, Ayatollah Ebrahim Amini, deputy leader of the Council of Experts—perhaps the most powerful institution in Iran—publicly warned that the country was on the verge of insurrection. Life is so bad for the Iranian people that many have begun fleeing the country. Recently, ten Iranians were found by Turkish authorities in the city of Van. Three were dead of malnutrition, and the others were in desperate physical condition.
The Iranian people's mounting desperation and disgust with the regime is driving them to take more and more overt action against the mullahs. In late May, a group of armed young people in the city of Lamerd in Fars Province attacked the Revolutionary Guards' headquarters, badly damaging the building. Troops had to be called in to put down the uprising, the latest of many in the past year.
Terror Masters
Despite Ayatollah Amini's admonitions against the use of repressive force, the regime is moving in the opposite direction. Interior Minister Abdol Vahed Moussavi-Lari ominously announced that the "crisis center"—a particularly nasty group of special forces and trained assassins—has again started to act. The Revolutionary Guards recently attacked buses carrying students on tour to the historical sites in Gomen, arresting seventy-three young men and women, killing two of them. Mohammad Khordadian, a noted folk dancer who lives in Los Angeles, returned to Iran a number of weeks ago to attend his mother's funeral. He was arrested at the Mehrabad airport and locked away, accused of "corrupting youth." Just on May 29, the reform-minded Nationalist-Religious Group published graphic photographs documenting the torture of Vahid Sadeqi, one of their activists.
This sort of information is not supposed to circulate in the Islamic Republic, whose leaders have been at pains to shut down any publication that reports the regime's evildoing. At the moment, virtually every newspaper worthy of the name has been shut down, six others are facing judicial action, several books have been banned, and judicial action has been undertaken against several members of the hapless Parliament.
Even fun is now under assault. Roadblocks manned by the Basij—the regime's version of the fascist storm troopers—now routinely stop cars playing forbidden Western music, and if unmarried women are found in the company of men, they are arrested and charged with moral corruption. Thirty people were arrested in Tehran on May 30, and eighty more were picked up in Fuman, all accused of "illegal and immoral behavior." Single women can be subjected to humiliating virginity tests, and if they flunk, they are given the option of marrying or being flogged.
The regime is also cracking down on simple expressions of opinion, most recently concerning relations with the United States. The Iranian people are probably the most enthusiastically pro-American in the Islamic world, and would love to see an active American presence in their country. The regime, at least publicly, constantly attacks the United States, and has banned any discussion of normalization of relations from all media, and even in school classrooms. When two journalists challenged the decree, they were quickly issued subpoenas.
These are only a few examples of the widespread repression of the Iranian people who, as President Bush remarked in his State of the Union address, have shown a great desire to be free of their regime. The mullahs are trying to deprive the Iranian people of all hope, and to that end they have intensified their terror campaign against the United States and its allies. They aim to drive America out of Afghanistan, just as Khomeini did in Lebanon in the 1980s: by killing and kidnapping Americans, and eventually demonstrating that the United States does not have staying power. The recent conference in Tehran shows their determination, and the considerable support they enjoy from the other terror masters.
The Iranian regime has recently provided chemical weapons to the Palestinian terrorists, and in honor of Khomeini's anniversary it has just contributed 314 (third month, fourteenth day) missiles to Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Afghanistan. Iran's intention to assault our soldiers is not a secret; hardly a day goes by without a leader of the regime pronouncing it. While some of the details of Iranian terrorist activity in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region are not known, we know enough to justify serious action against the regime in the name of self-defense.
America Should Respond
The legitimate desires of the Iranian people have been acknowledged by President Bush. Yet we still have no Iran strategy. There is no coordinated public policy, such as radio and television broadcast in Farsi, a sustained condemnation of the "mullahcracy" by our own leaders, and material assistance for those leading the freedom movement inside Iran. It is hard to imagine that the Iranian people require enormous support to rid themselves of their meddlesome priests, and, unlike the challenge in Iraq, one can readily envisage a successful regime change in Tehran without dropping a single American bomb or firing a single American bullet.
All we have to do is act in keeping with our national tradition of fighting tyranny. If the regime in Iran is brought down with our help, it will demonstrate to the Islamic world that radical Islamist regimes, whether Sunni (Afghanistan) or Shiite (Iran), ruin their countries and alienate their people, who prefer America to the mullahs. Is this not what the war against terrorism is supposed to accomplish?
Michael A. Ledeen is a resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at AEI.
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