Obama's terrorist-list
blunder Richard Javad Heydarian
The French diplomatic genius Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand once said: "It was worse
than a crime; it was a mistake." This is perhaps
the best way to describe the US State Department's
recent decision to take the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq
(MEK) off its notorious list of 52 foreign
terrorist organizations. It was yet another
setback in the negotiations between Iran and the
West on the former's nuclear program.
It
is one of those cynical moves that will only
exacerbate an already unfavorable diplomatic
atmosphere, suffering from a dearth of goodwill
and mutual trust. Iran and the US are already
stuck in a dangerous game of chicken: Washington
is pressing its advantage by increasingly
tightening the noose around Iran's
economy, while Tehran is
relentlessly pushing the boundaries of its
nuclear-enrichment capabilities toward a fait
accompli. Both sides are in essence locked in a
precarious form of brinkmanship, bringing the
world closer to a devastating confrontation. The
Persian Gulf has been witnessing increased
military tensions in recent months, with both the
US and Iran fortifying their military presence and
stepping up their military activities.
Meanwhile, sanctions have been biting into
Iran's increasingly vulnerable economy,
embittering the Iranian population toward the
West, especially the US. Instead of reaching out
to the Iranian people, as he repeatedly promised,
US President Barack Obama is not only imposing
what can be termed in international law as
collective punishment, but also accommodating an
organization that most Iranians identify with
treachery and deceit.
Obviously, the
current deadlock could only be broken through
sustained and meaningful diplomacy. However,
diplomatic efforts have been in a protracted state
of hiatus, with the Iranians postponing any major
agreement until the US overcomes its cyclical
diplomatic handicap - the inability to make a
decisive and lasting concession until the
conclusion of the presidential election.
The MEK decision is also a classic example
of how domestic politics can derail high-stake
diplomacy, with the fate of international security
hanging in the balance. To secure his re-election
bid, President Obama is trying hard to look tough
on Iran. But what Obama ignores is how his
short-term political calculations may carry
long-term risks vis-a-vis the Iranian nuclear
issue.
An ambivalent
decision The delisting of the MEK came
ahead of a court-ordered October deadline, with US
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sending
a classified document to Congress earlier,
detailing her department's position on the matter.
In 1997, the State Department placed the
MEK on its Foreign Terrorist Organizations List
for its history of terrorist activities,
especially against US citizens in the 1970s.
However, ironically, Washington protected the MEK
members in Iraq's Camp Ashraf after toppling
Saddam Hussein, the organization's main patron.
Later, when the group came under increasing
pressure - ahead of US troop withdrawal - by the
Tehran-backed government in Baghdad, Washington
opposed any violent crackdown on the camp, while
exploring means to transfer MEK members elsewhere.
Finally, amid a logistical headache and rising
political noise, Washington transferred some of
the 3,000-strong MEK militia to Camp Liberty, a
former US military base near Baghdad International
Airport.
The State Department justified
its delisting of the MEK on the grounds that the
organization has publicly renounced violence,
cooperated in the closure of Camp Ashraf, and has
shunned terrorism for more than a decade.
Crucially, the move came in the midst of
continuous vilification of Iran as an imminent
nuclear threat that should be met with force, a
narrative enthusiastically espoused by a wide
spectrum ranging from hawkish Republicans in the
US Congress to pundits in the mainstream media as
well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
(and his powerful friends in the Israel lobby in
the US). Netanyahu has already called for an
explicit "red line" against Iran's nuclear
program, coaxing Washington to place the military
option squarely on the table.
However, it
is not clear whether Washington actually sees the
MEK as a possible asset and a viable ally in the
event of direct confrontation with Iran as the
window for a diplomatic compromise rapidly
narrows. The delisting was perhaps just an effort
to annoy Tehran or, more important, to appease the
anti-Iran establishment amid the current US
presidential election campaign.
For its
proponents, the recent move was just a logical
extension of a broader Western accommodation of an
organization that claims to represent the
"legitimate democratic opposition" in Iran.
Britain delisted the MEK back in 2008 and the
European Union a year later. The group has
significant presence in such places as Paris,
which hosts its headquarters, and has staged major
rallies in the French capital.
Maryam
Rajavi, the organization's Paris-based leader,
welcomed the US move by stating: "This has been
the correct decision, albeit long overdue, in
order to remove a major obstacle in the path of
the Iranian people's efforts for democracy."
Anti-Iran hawks in the US hardly held back
their enthusiasm. Republican Representative Dana
Rohrabacher expressed his joy with the decision,
because he believes "the MEK are Iranians who
desire a secular, peaceful and democratic
government", while Ted Poe, Republican member of
the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs
Committee, described the decision as "long
overdue".
The decision is a culmination of
years of lavish and aggressive lobbying by the MEK
- boosted by growing support from rich
Iranian-American exiles opposed to the regime in
Tehran - directed at (current and former) top US
officials and leaders from both the Democratic and
Republican camps.
The MEK spent US$1.5
million alone to hire three leading Washington
lobby firms. It channeled millions of dollars in
"speaking fees" to sympathetic American officials
and leaders who graced the MEK's high-profile
events, rallies and campaign gatherings calling
for the State Department to delist the
organization.
The list of top-notch
supporters is astonishing. The former Democratic
governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, has been
among the group's biggest beneficiaries,
reportedly receiving up to $150,000 in speaking
fees. For the Republican chairwoman of the House
Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen,
the figure stands at around $20,000. Former
presidential candidates from both the Republican
and Democratic parties, namely Bill Richardson,
Howard Dean and Rudolf Giuliani, have also joined
the fray.
With the speaking-engagement
fees running in the territory of $15,000-$30,000,
former top security/intelligence officials, namely
ex-Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis
Freeh, former Central Intelligence Agency
directors Porter Goss and James Woolsey, and
Obama's former national security adviser General
James Jones, have lent their support too. Even
Wesley Clark, a former North Atlantic Treaty
Organization commander, is among the elite
supporters.
What is clear is that the
Obama administration has found it increasingly
difficult to ignore an organization that has
astutely exploited growing cynicism against Iran,
staged numerous rallies and vigils outside the
State Department, organized huge sit-ins in
congressional hearings, and rallied the support of
leading US figures. The administration has finally
succumbed to the pressure. But this domestic
concession could carry significant costs in the
broader multilateral efforts to resolve the
Iranian nuclear conundrum.
Potential
diplomatic fallout In the initial years of
the Islamic Revolution, its supporters had to
contend with the MEK, an organization founded on
an eclectic Marxist-Islamist-nationalist ideology,
as a major rival in determining the fate of the
new Islamic Republic. After all, during the 1979
revolution, the MEK was among the major players
within the broad coalition of forces that deposed
the Shah. After a series of violent confrontations
in the immediate post-revolutionary years, a
severely weakened MEK lost whatever measure of
popular legitimacy it enjoyed when it sided with
Saddam Hussein against Iran during the eight-year
"imposed war" (Jang-e-Tahmili).
After its
expulsion from Iran, much of its paramilitary
capability was concentrated in Iraq, under the
generous sponsorship of the Baathist regime. So it
practically lost any significant presence within
Iran. The MEK is an organization with few to no
roots within Iran's political landscape, so it is
not clear how it could play a critical role in
changing that landscape and/or Tehran's nuclear
posture to America's advantage. This is precisely
why successive US administrations have instead
reached out to reformist elements within Iran,
never seeing the MEK as a viable ally.
It
must be noted that Washington's 1997 decision to
include the MEK in the list of terrorist
organizations was part of its nascent diplomatic
outreach to the newly empowered reformist
government in Tehran under president Mohammad
Khatami. After all, inclusion of groups in the
Foreign Terrorist Organization list has been
generally arbitrary, simply tuned to America's
short-term strategic interests.
In recent
years the Obama administration, at least
rhetorically, sided with Iran's so-called Green
Movement - a loose network of forces composed of
certain reformist leaders and disenchanted
sections of the society - that formed the backbone
of post-election protests in 2009. However, there
have never been institutionalized channels of
communication between Washington and Iran's
leading reformists. So it seems that accommodating
the MEK is somehow a desperate effort to build
ties with alternative Iranian elements explicitly
opposed to the regime.
Yet there may have
been even more concrete reasons. Reports
suggesting increased intelligence and security
cooperation between the MEK on the one hand and
Israeli and US agencies on the other in recent
years provide the strongest hint behind
Washington's decision to delist the group.
In 2002, an MEK-affiliate group, the
National Council of Resistance in Iran, revealed a
laptop containing confidential information about
Iran's burgeoning enrichment activities in Natanz
and Arak. Since the MEK does not possess an
independent and credible intelligence-gathering
capacity, it is widely believed that Israeli
intelligence agencies were behind the leaked
documents. The revelation marked the beginning of
a decade of tense nuclear negotiations between
Iran and world powers, which precipitated a severe
set of sanctions and repeated threats of military
intervention against Tehran.
In April this
year, leading investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh reported that back in 2005, the Nevada-based
Joint Special Operations Command trained "Iranians
associated with the MEK" as part of the George W
Bush administration's broader "global war on
terror". Commentators have also suggested that
various Western intelligence agencies, especially
Israel's Mossad, have been working closely with
the MEK in a "shadow war" ranging from sabotage
against Iran's key military and oil facilities to
the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists
and sabotage of nuclear installations.
Understandably, the Iranian authorities
immediately lashed out against Washington's
decision to delist one of its most long-standing
nemeses. Iran holds the MEK responsible for at
least 12,000 deaths, including high-profile
members of the regime in the early years of the
revolution. Iranian state television accused the
US of double standards by supporting "good
terrorists" who serve its interests by working
against Iran and its nuclear program. The Iranian
Foreign Ministry warned that the decision would
put on the US "responsibility for past, present
and future terrorist operations by this group",
just as Rajavi expressed her hopes that the
delisting "will lead to the expansion of
anti-regime activities within Iran".
Negotiations on the nuclear program are
already in bad shape. Despite repeated overtures
by Tehran - from decreasing enrichment activities
to the 3-5% territory, to shipping out its
stockpile of high-enriched uranium, and opening up
of its whole nuclear infrastructure for inspection
- to resolve the standoff, the Obama
administration has repeatedly refused to meet
Iran's two basic demands: (1) An unequivocal
recognition of Iran's enrichment rights under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); and (2) reversal
of unilateral sanctions battering Iran's entire
economy.
Obama's accommodation of the MEK
will further undermine its nuclear diplomacy
toward Iran. It will do nothing but strengthen the
hands of Iranian hardliners - at the expense of
pro-diplomacy pragmatists - who have called for a
withdrawal from the NPT, an increase of enrichment
levels to 60%, and preparations for a military
confrontation with the West.
Beyond regime
insiders, the Obama administration has also
alienated ordinary Iranians and opposition
elements who detest the MEK and view the latest
move as another cynical ploy to retard Iran's
scientific progress and bring the country to its
knees.
Richard Javad Heydarian
is a Manila-based foreign-affairs analyst. He has
reported for or been quoted in The Diplomat, UPI,
Foreign Policy, Tehran Times, Russia Today and
Foreign Policy In Focus, among others.
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