TEHRAN (FNA)- On Sunday, September 23, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani couldn’t be more accurate when he said the United States is a "bully" that wants to create insecurity in the Islamic Republic, following an attack on a military parade that killed 26 people, including members of the country's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps.
Rouhani further accused the US-backed Persian Gulf Arab states of providing financial and military support for anti-government terrorist groups inside Iran.
This is not out of the ordinary. President Trump’s last year visit to Saudi Arabia, during which he loudly pushed for general hostility toward Iran, can’t help but also be noted for being followed so quickly by virtually unheard of terror attacks and unrest in Iran. On balance, the Trump administration isn't eyeing America's safety as much as a regime change:
1) Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, while addressing a recent rally staged by the anti-Iran terrorist group of Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization (MKO) in Paris, called for regime change in Tehran. MKO or MEK was once listed as a terrorist organization in the US and Europe and is still widely viewed as a death cult built around the personality of its leader, Maryam Rajavi. During the gathering, Giuliani said, “We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran… which must be replaced by a democratic government which Rajavi represents. Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran”!
2) In May, Trump abrogated the 2015 international nuclear deal and ordered a campaign of intense economic pressure, threatening sanctions against any foreign company doing business with Iran and calling for an end to trade in Iranian oil by November. In the Paris convention, Giuliani said the recent wave of protests in Iran was being orchestrated from outside. “Those protests are not happening spontaneously,” Giuliani said. “They are happening because of many of our people in Albania [which hosts an MKO compound] and many of our people here and throughout the world.” “Our people” means the US and the MKO and other terrorist groups, which have no support in Iran and are widely hated for their use of violence and close links to Saudi-Israeli intelligence services.
3) The policy of the Trump administration is not officially to call for regime change, but top officials have often made that clear in public. Outlining his approach in May, Pompeo said it was up to the Iranian people to relieve the pressure on the country by changing their government. However, regime change is on the agenda, as it involves waging economic war against Iran and backing terror attacks within the country, like the one that was carried out in Ahvaz, for which the terrorist groups of ISIL and Al-Ahvazieh with links to the US and Saudi Arabia claimed responsibility.
4) The Trump camp itself is open to the dark arts. Trump has selected John Bolton as his national security adviser. Bolton’s appointment, along with the nomination of Iran deal critic Pompeo as secretary of state, helped to kill and bury the nuclear agreement and pave the way for confrontation with Iran. Bolton has spent the better part of a decade calling for the US to help overthrow the government in Tehran and hand power to the terrorist group of MKO. Also speaking at the Paris convention, Bolton said the Trump administration should embrace the MKO’s goal of immediate regime change in Iran and recognize the group as a “viable” alternative. “The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday,” Bolton said. The 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution will be on February 11, 2019.
5) The Trump administration views terror attacks and protests as the best avenue for regime change in Tehran without a US military intervention. To that end, Pompeo says the US is stepping up its propaganda broadcasts to Iran with help from Persian-language TV channels based in Europe and the US, and portrays the sanctions as targeting the government, even though the unjustified economic pressure ultimately touches Iranians of all walks of life.
Overall, the notion that Iranians are clamoring for the fall of the Islamic Republic and welcome American assistance in precipitating that fall is the same kind of “we will be greeted as liberators” nonsense the Bush administration believed in the lead-up to the illegal Iraq War in 2003. Iranians want a better life, but the Syria-style collapse of their economy, society, and state is surely not the kind of change they have in mind. After all, we now know that their guild-related protests discouraged the US since their numbers never went beyond a few thousand, which never lasted more than a week, despite what had been promised by the US and its puppets. Picking up the MKO and the son of the deposed Shah has been the best service the US could render to the government in Iran as it encouraged even those few thousands to go back home after they came to see the truth.
In addition, the fact that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and of course Israel are influencing the Trump administration’s anti-Iran strategy is further evidence that Washington didn’t act alone in supporting the terrorists that carried out the September 22 attack in Ahvaz. The aim of their plan is not for Iran to pursue internal reform and external dialogue as Trump would like to claim, but for the Islamic Republic government to collapse entirely so that it can no longer stop their regime-change fantasies and undermine their illicit interests and designs in the region. Little wonder they hardly cared when the Southwestern city of Ahvaz was violently attacked.
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