JOHN BOLTON MEK TERRORISTS CAUSED TRUMP’S IRAN POLICY FAILURE

BY TRT World

Massoumeh Torfeh, TRT World, July 05 2019:… Bolton’s alleged favourite team, the former US-terrorist-listed organisation, MEK, has disappeared off the radar after its controversial gathering last June in Paris attended by Trump’s inner circle. Meanwhile, the regime-change idea uttered by the US National Security Advisor John Bolton, and the lavish communications plans funded by the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have all flopped.  Demonstrations inside Iran have died down, and a few small anti-Iran groups operating mainly from the US (or Albania) have fizzled out. John Bolton MEK Terrorists Caused Trump’s Iran Policy Failure 

MEK Impunity Undermining Democracy

John Bolton MEK Terrorists Caused Trump’s Iran Policy Failure

Trump has overplayed his hand with Iran

US President Donald Trump has taken several aggressive actions that Iran has all but absorbed. Now, he’s left with few options aside from a military strike, which he says he doesn’t want. So what now?

With three US warships operating in the Persian Gulf and a “maximum pressure” campaign in full force against the Iranian ruling elite,  including 1000 sanctions, US President Donald Trump has given Iran reasonable justification for returning to its uncooperative pre-2015 position.

It was President Trump, who in May 2018, violated the landmark nuclear deal –  by withdrawing from it — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani warned the international community on Wednesday that Tehran would boost its uranium enrichment to “any amount that we want” after July 7.

Rouhani said Tehran would return to full compliance if all parties, including the United States, also complied. More steps are likely to follow.

President Trump has clearly overplayed his hand, leaving himself little room for exerting further pressure on Iran other than a military strike, which he has said he does not favour.

Rouhani, ridiculing Trump on Wednesday asked if there were any more sanctions or threats he’d like to impose or any more statements he wants to issue.

“Go ahead issue them now, why wait for later,” he said.

Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif claimed in a Tweet that Iran had acted entirely within the terms of JCPOA which specifies a party could “cease performing its commitments” in the event of “significant non-performance” by any of the other parties.

Trump, who has never offered a clear policy line on Iran — aside from his cabinet’s hawkish rhetoric of regime change — made a mistake ignoring Iran’s relative leniency in April when Zarif, spoke to Fox News tacitly asking the US president to drop his pressure campaign.

For months President Trump has been going on about talks but acting ever more aggressively and humiliating Iran with pressure and accusations, the latest being on the recent tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf. His American adversaries saw these as an excuse to attack Iran.

Take the nonsensical White House statement on July 2 blaming Iran for violating the terms of JCPOA “even before” it was agreed: “There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms.”

It’s clear that Trump is trying to use the same strategy that brought him success as a real estate developer in the 90s.

“I will demand anything I can get,” said the younger Donald Trump in an interview with the Playboy Magazine describing how he used to win multi-billion dollar deals.

“When you’re doing business, you take people to the brink of breaking them without having them break, to the maximum point their heads can handle–without breaking them. That’s the sign of a good businessman,” he said.

He admits in that interview that the aim is to get a good deal and if he pushed too far that would’ve been a mistake. That seems to be the case with his handling of relations with Iran.

While sanctions are devastating the economy, Iran seems to have gradually adjusted to the pressure and found some accommodation with other JCPOA signatories over trade.

INSTEX is now available to all European Union member-states and will soon be open to economic operators in third countries. European signatories of the JCPOA have so far refrained from calling for the re-imposition of sanctions, which is now possible because of Iran’s non-compliance.

Meanwhile, the regime-change idea uttered by the US National Security Advisor John Bolton, and the lavish communications plans funded by the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have all flopped. 

Demonstrations inside Iran have died down, and a few small anti-Iran groups operating mainly from the US (or Albania) have fizzled out.

The former Shah’s son, Prince Reza Pahlavi who called for Iranians in the diaspora to unite around him and support regime change inside does not seem to have gained many supporters.

Bolton’s alleged favourite team, the former US-terrorist-listed organisation, MEK, has disappeared off the radar after its controversial gathering last June in Paris attended by Trump’s inner circle.

The event was broadcast live from an allegedly Saudi-funded Persian language television called Iran International and reported in full by the American funded Radio Farda.

Another group called “Fereshgard” mainly famous for its abusive language on social media has been vastly discredited.

While those groups never had a significant following inside Iran, the internal calls for reform have continued to pose the biggest concern for the Iranian regime.

Those calls were there before Trump came to power and will continue after his presidency too.

The damaging impact of President Trump’s miscalculation is that Iran now poses an even greater threat both at home and internationally. It may also opt out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Iran will probably never hold talks with the US, and we can expect a protracted stalemate.

Perhaps the EU and the UN as the guarantors of the JCPOA must shoulder some of the responsibility for failing to either deter President Trump from his aggressive approach or acting sooner to find mediators for talks between Iran and the US.

Dr. Massoumeh Torfeh is a Research Associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science specialising in Iran and Afghanistan. Formerly she was a BBC journalist and UN spokesperson and director of communication.

America’s War against Iran: The Insidious Role of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) Terrorist Entity

By Robert Fantina

In 2015, the United States, several other nations and the European Union signed an agreement with the government of Iran that limited Iran’s nuclear development program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against Iran. During the final years of the Obama presidency, and the first year of the bizarre and erratic administration of Donald Trump, all parties were in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This was attested to by the United Nation International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which inspected Iran’s nuclear sites regularly, and the fact that many nations were now freely and profitably trading with Iran.

But as Trump attempted to undo everything his popular predecessor had accomplished, he violated the JCPOA by withdrawing from it completely. He reissued sanctions, and threatened the other signatories, including some of the U.S.’s oldest and closest allies, with sanctions if they continued trading with Iran. The deal collapsed, with all the parties except Iran in violation of it.

The U.S. violation was condemned around the world, by nearly every nation on the planet except apartheid Israel, whose racist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had addressed the U.S. Congress before that body voted, urging its members to defeat the agreement; despite his efforts, Congress agreed to support the JCPOA.

Wanting out of the deal, Trump sought some rationale that he felt would pass muster with the public, to enable him to violate both domestic and international law. His minions located an article by one Heshmat Alavi, saying that the deal allowed Iran to increase its military budget, something to which the U.S. objected.

There are a few things worth exploring a bit more deeply in this. First, since the United States has a bloated military budget that is equal to the military budgets of the next eight countries with the largest such budgets, it is a bit disingenuous for the U.S. to criticize any other country’s military budget. And since Iran is surrounded by U.S. military bases, it is completely understandable for that nation to want to be sure it has what it needs to protect its people from U.S. aggression.

Next, let us look at the ‘journalist’ who wrote the article Trump cited, one Heshmat Alavi. His purported work has appeared in a wide variety of journals over the years. However, on closer scrutiny, we learn that Mr. Alavi simply doesn’t exist! He is a creation of the political wing of the terrorist organization known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which exists for the sole purpose of overthrowing the government of Iran. From 1997 to 2012, the MEK was officially designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States.

Despite that fact that many articles have appeared under the name Heshmat Alavi, and there are active Faceook and Twitter accounts under that name, a Google search of that name today exposes the fact that there is no such person. Yet the MEK has successfully fooled many journals; for example, at least sixty-one articles under that name appear in Forbes magazine from April of 2017 to April of 2018.

False Identities Become the New Weapon: War with Iran Promoted by Fake Journalists

This raises even more questions: why does the U.S. need invented ‘journalists’ to sell its anti-Iran story? Could it be, possibly, because the truth is nothing like the U.S. says, and so relying on a made-up writer for made-up stories is the best it can do?

And what about journalistic integrity? One can imagine Forbes falling for one, or even two articles by a bogus, non-existent journalist, but sixty-one in one year? Does no one question this?

Most journalists (this writer included), don’t hide from the public. In addition to writing, they speak at public forums, and their faces may be almost as well-known as their names. Where has the illusive Mr. Alavi been? Was he too busy writing all those articles for Forbes to crawl out of whatever hole he lived in to speak publicly about issues important to him? No, that is not the case; he was unable to speak at any conference, symposium, rally, etc., because he doesn’t exist.

This is the ‘writer’ whose ‘work’ Donald Trump cited to justify violating international law, and to bring the threat of a devastating war to an area of the world that his predecessor had made significant progress in calming. This is the ‘writer’ that not only Forbes, but The Hill, the Daily Caller, the Diplomat and other so-called responsible news outlets gave a platform to.

And what is MEK? It is a well-organized terrorist group, which gets support from the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, the United States, and seeks the overthrow of the Iranian government. It is described as “widely loathed”[1] among Iranians, yet one article ascribed to Alavi says it’s the “main Iranian opposition group”[2]. How ‘he’ purports to speak for Iranians, when ‘he’ heads a group hated by most of them, is beyond rational comprehension.

The MEK has gained influence in U.S. government circles and has paid prominent politicians to speak on its behalf.  The Intercept, on June 9 of this year, further reported that “…the MEK’s messaging has emphasized regime change – and attempted to present the MEK as a viable alternative to the Islamic Republic’s leadership….”[3] Articles under the name Alavi support these positions, and often put forward the name of Maryam Rajavi, MEK’s leader, as the future leader of Iran.

This indicates the level of credibility that the U.S. has. How can anyone take seriously the pronouncements of a government that uses a non-existent journalist to establish policy? How can the U.S. news media be seen as credible, when it publishes numerous articles under the name of a non-existent person?

This is, of course, hardly the first time that the U.S. has increased and justified its aggression and belligerency based on lies, lies that the media heartily endorses. Prior to the Gulf War (1990 – 1991), President George H. W. Bush cited the moving testimony given to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus by a young woman named Nariyah, who claimed to be a teenage volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital. ‘Nariyah’ said this:

“While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying.”[4]

Bush and members of Congress cited this testimony repeatedly to gain support for the war. News outlets readily parroted these words. Yet it was all a lie. ‘Nariyah’ was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. She eventually admitted that she had once briefly visited the hospital in question. Her testimony was arranged by the Hill and Knowlton (H&K) public relations firm, hired by an organization called ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’, which was financed mainly by the Kuwaiti government.[5]

Will the MEK have the same success as ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’ had nearly thirty years ago? Will it be instrumental in starting yet another unjust war in which countless innocent men, women and children will die by the mighty U.S. war machine? One hopes that cooler heads prevail, but in the Trump White House, there don’t seem to be any. An invasion of Iran by the U.S. or Israel would have disastrous consequences throughout the world. Leaders of all other governments should be doing everything in their power to prevent it.

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Notes

[1] https://iran-interlink.org/wordpress/mek-cult-operatives-undermining-american-democracy/. Accessed on June 17, 2019

[2] https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/heshmat-alavi-fake-iran-mek/. Accessed on June 17.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Michael Kunczik, Images of Nations and International Public Relations (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 280.

[5] Ted Rowse, “Kuwaitgate,” The Washington Monthly, September 1992

France, Yellow Vests and the MEK

by ROBERT FANTINA

No one today is surprised at the foreign policy of the United States. War, violation of international law and disdain for human rights are all characteristics of the criminal enterprise known as the U.S. government.

Most of the U.S.’s allies display some or all of these same vices, but some are often considered above such activities. One that is mistakenly believed to be better than the U.S. is France. A look at some of its current policies is instructive.

At present, there are two groups active in France. One is known as the ‘Yellow Vests’ an informal organization that started to protest an increase in fuel taxes, and expanded to oppose a wide range of practices of the government of President Emmanuel Macron that are seen as detrimental to the public. There was no well-established plan and no recognized leader.

The second organization is the MEK (Mujahideen-e Khalq), a terrorist organization that seeks the overthrow of the Iranian government. MEK members have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

One would think that a responsive government would react positively to protesters opposing government policies. Government officials would look at those policies; acknowledge the problems they cause, and work with the opposition, in this case, the Yellow Vests, to fully understand their concerns. Then they would work to resolve the issues.

One would also think that any reasonable government would condemn a well-organized and well-financed terrorist group, and offer no support to it in any form.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the government of France. The reverse, unfortunately, is true. The Macron government works tirelessly and violently to end the Yellow Vest protests, while it welcomes and supports the MEK.

Why would this be? The explanation is not difficult to see.

Like most world leaders, Macron isn’t beholden to the people of France, but to keeping the rich where they are, with little or no consideration for those less fortunate. As in the United States, it is the middle class that bears the largest tax burden, while the poor lose entitlements such as assistance with buying food and paying for housing. The tax overhaul that was passed in the United States last year overwhelmingly benefited the rich, at the expense of everyone else. France seems to follow this model.

And what of French support for MEK? This follows the hypocrisy usually demonstrated by the United States. France, one of the signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), condemned the U.S. withdrawal from this international agreement, and French government officials are looking for a means to circumvent the threatened U.S. sanctions if its corporations continue to do business with Iran. Yet they support a terrorist organization whose sole purpose is the overthrow of the Iranian government.

What has Iran done to incur the wrath of France? The government of Iran worked with the Syrian government, one of its close allies, to defeat U.S.-backed rebels who were attempting the overthrow of the Syrian government. Iran also develops defensive weapons to protect its people from a possible attack by the U.S. or apartheid Israel.

Yet Iran hasn’t invaded another country since 1798; it occupies no countries, and its bombs only fell on terrorist-held sites in Syria, at the request of the Syrian government. Why would France object to a nation that honors international alliances, develops an effective defense system, and basically minds its own business on the global stage? And why would France work so diligently to destroy legitimate protests in its own cities?

The United States differs from Iran in many ways. Currently, the U.S. is bombing at least five countries. It continues to support anti-government rebels in Syria. Yet it gives unreserved support to the brutal apartheid Zionist regime, and has close ties with Saudi Arabia which, like Israel, has an abominable human rights record. Since the end of World War II, it is estimated that the U.S. has killed at least 20,000,000 people, by invading or supporting rebels in at least 30 countries. And the rebels it supports always oppose a democratically-elected government, and support a brutal and cruel dictator.

Domestically, the U.S. has the highest number of citizens per capita in its prisons, and hunger and poverty are among the highest for any industrialized nation.

Despite the clown-like Donald Trump inhabiting the White House, much of the world remains intimidated by the U.S.’s reckless use of its power. While Trump is bogged down in a ‘partial’ government shut-down, along with a variety of investigations into his questionable associations with foreign leaders and porn stars, he continues to control the most powerful military system, and the strongest economy, on the planet. France, like most other countries, bows and scrapes to the imperial U.S. master.

Yet all is not well on the French or U.S. fronts. The Yellow Vests aren’t showing any signs of going away anytime soon, and Trump’s bullying isn’t having the impact he would have liked. The fact that several nations are looking for ways around his threatened sanctions is in itself a good sign, one that is indicative of dwindling U.S. power and influence. While France praises the terrorist MEK, it also seeks ways of continuing to trade with Iran.

The United States is a world power in decline, as shown by the mixed signals that France is sending: support for an anti-Iran terrorist group, while also seeking to maintain the JCPOA. The leaders of any declining imperial nation will do all they can to stem the tide of their decreasing power, and this makes such nations even more dangerous, at least in the short-term. France’s government officials should be cautious about which other countries they align their policies with; short-term gains can result in disastrous long-term losses, and France, at this point, appears to be on the wrong side of history. It is hoped that it will soon change course, and seek domestic and international justice.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).