US-Iran Coup Planning in Iraq? |
The US has taken the astounding step in Iraq of releasing into Iran's custody two high ranking military Iranian officers captured by US forces two days ago and suspected of planning terrorist attacks against US forces, according to the San Jose Mercury News. One of the captured officers is the third ranking leader of Iran's Special Operation Forces (see "Iraq frees Iranian operatives arrested in raids, angers US." 29 December 07). According to published reports, the Iranian agents were captured with planning documents for terrorist attacks on US and Iraqi forces.
To quote the San Jose Mercury News:
"One of the commanders, identified by officials simply as Chizari, was the third-highest-ranking official of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Al-Quds Brigade, the unit most active in aiding, arming and training groups outside Iran, including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, U.S. officials said. The other commander was described as equally significant to Iran's support of foreign militaries but not as high ranking."
The US decision to release these high raking Iranian officials is striking for several reasons.
First, these Iranian officials, especially Chizari , would be knowledgeable not only about specific Iranian attacks being planned but of Iranian terrorism plans across the board in Iraq, including political activities. The US released Chizari before undertaking an interrogation to gain access to his information. By doing so, the US has put US military and civilian personnel at risk. Iran can now move ahead with previously planned attacks with the awareness that US forces US will not be alerted.
Second, for this reason, the US military did not approve of the decision to release these high ranking Iranian officials, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Who did approve this decision, in effect overriding the standing policy on interrogations established by GEN Casey? The authority to override GEN Casey could not come from Ambassador Khalilzad, who has no authority over US military personnel in Iraq. Was this decision to override GEN Casey made by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who speaks for President Bush?
Third, how extensive is the cooperation between US civilian officials, including Ambassador Khalilzad, with Iranian officials involved in planning terrorism, as well as with Iraqi supporters of the Badr Brigade including Abdul Aziz al-Hakim? The US military has no such contacts with the Badr Brigade and Hakim or it would most likely not have staged the raid on Hakim's compound in the first place, where several Iranian and Badr Brigade officials were detained. Moreover, the US military would not have objected to the release of Chizai and officials and insisted upon access to their information.
In short, has a split emerged in US policy on terrorism in Iraq with the US military opposed to Iran, the Badr Brigade, and Hakim, while US civilian officials, backed up by the White House and State, are in favor of US contacts with the Badr Brigade and Hakim?
Moreover, is State's support for the Badr Brigade tied to State's support for Hakim's ambitions to replace Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister. In the past several weeks Hakim has been involved in extensive negotiations with Iran and with other Iraqi political parties to ease Maliki, who is backed by Muqtada al-Sadr, from power. Only the last minute opposition from Ayatollah Sistani has preserved the Maliki government from falling in the face this Iranian-State Department campaign.
To be even more specific, is the Badr Brigade, supported by Hakim and Iran, planning to stage a coup in Baghdad against the Maliki government? Are the detained Iranian officials aware of this coup planning? Is this why the Iranian officials are not being questioned and have been released into Iran�s custody? Are the 20,000 new US troops for Baghad, part of the Bush Administation's "surge" strategy, to be used to protect the new Hakim pro-Iran government?
The Sunday Times April 09, 2006
Bush’s salon revolutionaries plot an Iran coup
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky
Washington think tanks are pushing for the toppling of another regime
For me the alarm bells began to ring in the unlikely surroundings of the ancient Trout Inn near Oxford. A senior Republican party foreign affairs insider, as hawkish as they come and a staunch backer of the Iraq war, made a bitter complaint about the incompetence of George W Bush’s international policy. If my Republican friend is so critical, I thought, the US president must be in real trouble.
The seriousness of his difficulties is shown by the way in which the American administration is courting an unlikely stage army of salon revolutionaries who are promising to provide a painless way to get rid of the nasty regimes of the “axis of evil” in Iran and North Korea.
Peter Ackerman, the very rich chairman of Freedom House, and his International Center on Nonviolent Conflict are engaged in a huge propaganda campaign designed to show how the worst of regimes can be toppled by the methods used — or claimed to have been used — to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and in the “colour” revolutions that led to pro-western regimes in Ukraine (the orange revolution) and Georgia (the rose revolution).
Political street protests led by organisers trained secretly in the West and supplied with nifty communications gadgets are capable — so the argument goes — of ousting dictators.
But are conditions in Iran the same as those that followed the elections in Ukraine in 2004? Do street protests and similar techniques always work? The disastrous experiences of Tiananmen Square, of Prague in 1968 and Hungary in 1956 are conveniently overlooked. Nor does the State Department have many good ideas about how to spend the $75m recently allocated to promote democracy in Iran. The bulk of the money will be spent on radio broadcasts to be beamed into the country.
In the normal course of events it would not be worth considering the delusional arguments of Ackerman and his supporter Michael Ledeen, a journalist based at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who was a central figure in the notorious Iran contra affair during President Reagan’s administration. But President Bush and Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state, have both addressed meetings organised by Ackerman’s Freedom House in the past two weeks. There are many other signs that the policy of promoting revolution and regime change in Tehran is gaining ground in Washington.
The US president is very much in a “last-chance saloon” mood as he made clear recently to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. If he is to solve the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions he must achieve his objective before he leaves office in January 2009. So he is turning to a policy of subversion combined with plans for military action. There is convincing evidence that US diplomats are pressuring Turkish authorities to agree to the use of its main air base for attacks by American B-52 bombers on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Since my time as an adviser to the policy planning staff of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and as a founder governor of the invaluable Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), I have enjoyed close contact with Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This body and other US organisations that promote democracy are worried that the secretive and subversive activities advocated by Ackerman, and being pressed for with some success on Capitol Hill, at the Pentagon and in the White House, will taint their past 20 years of international activity.
The projects of the NED — like those of the WFD — are funded by government but are transparent. They are not subversive. And they have played a positive role in encouraging democracy in dozens of nations. Respected members of the Iranian exile community in America are also worried that the attempted subversion of the regime in Tehran will backfire, consolidating support for Iranian hardliners and preventing regime change for the next 30 years.
Nevertheless, the seriousness of the underlying problem of nuclear proliferation cannot be denied. Nor will it be possible to negotiate successfully with regimes such as President Ahmadinejad’s unless there is a credible threat of the use of force. However long remains before Iran acquires a military nuclear capacity — itself a matter of uncertainty and misinformation — America and the West will need to decide whether they are prepared to tolerate an Iranian nuclear bomb and if they are willing to countenance the spread of such bombs to increasing numbers of unsavoury regimes.
Criticism of the Bush administration’s policy is not based on the fact that it is considering a military option against Iran. Any government needs to do this if it is to negotiate with Ahmadinejad
The problems are, first, that there seems to be no strategic thinking about the prospect of nuclear proliferation. Is it to be tackled by containment (as used against the Soviet Union and China in the cold war)? Or is it necessary to prevent proliferation, even if this requires military action as a last resort?
Second, the US administration lacks consistency. It has come to terms with the North Korean bomb. It is actively supporting India. It necessarily remains on good terms with Pakistan. Foreign policy obviously requires realism and pragmatism. It also requires some consistency of doctrine.
Third, Bush’s Washington still pays far too much heed to some of the wilder propagandists based in think tanks. Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI (for which I once wrote a scholarly volume on British political history) are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.
Finally, the Bush administration needs to ensure that the transparent, positive activities in the field of democracy promotion conducted in many countries by the NED and by a network of publicly funded bodies are not made casualties of the battle against nuclear proliferation.
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky is a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems in Washington
Andrew Sullivan is away
Date: 11/22/2004 04:40:50 By JEET HEER and LAURA ROZEN Houston Chronicle
$20 million for a coup in Iran? :Overthrow Tehran? Hey, Not So Fast
With President Bush elected to a second term, and the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war firmly in the driver's seat of U.S. foreign policy, Iranian-Americans are contemplating a stark choice similar to that faced by Iraqi-Americans a few years ago — whether they want to work with Washington to liberate their home country.
Although almost all Iranian-Americans want to see democracy flourish in their native land, there are intense and divisive debates on how to achieve this goal and what a future Iranian government should look like. These debates are certain to grow only more intense in the coming months, as Iran's accelerating nuclear program vaults it to the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
The activities of Michael Ledeen, one of the most prominent of the Washington neoconservatives advocating that the United States back a plan to overthrow the mullahs, illustrate some of the complexities of modern-day regime change.
Trained as a historian, and now the "Freedom Scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of the National Review, Ledeen first came to public prominence during the Reagan administration. While serving as a consultant to national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, he became entangled in the arms-for-hostages trade that became part of the Iran-Contra scandal. It was Ledeen who brought the U.S. government into contact with the Parisian-based Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who claimed he would be able to win the release of U.S. hostages held in Lebanon by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in exchange for U.S. weapons.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Ledeen has resumed contact with Ghorbanifar, as he has set about gathering information to lobby the Bush administration, private constituencies and public opinion to back a plan to destabilize the Iranian regime and support dissident forces. In a December 2001 meeting in Rome, first reported in Newsday, Ledeen introduced Ghorbanifar to two Pentagon officials interested in discussing the regime change idea.
In June 2003, one of those Pentagon officials, Harold Rhode, went to meet Ghorbanifar in Paris for further discussions — a meeting the Pentagon originally said was the result of a chance encounter.
On April 21, 2003, in the final days of the major combat operations in Iraq, Ledeen traveled to Los Angeles, where he spoke to a group of about 200 Iranian exiles. The event was organized by the owner of a Los Angeles-based Persian radio station, said to be sympathetic to the monarchists (the people surrounding the late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in a Washington suburb).
"The Iranian diaspora is one of the richest diasporas in history," Ledeen told the audience, according to a tape recording of the event. "So as you contemplate the future of Iran, think first about how to organize the Iranian community and diaspora to raise money for Iranians in Iran to stage democratic revolution that we all know can succeed."
The private money, Ledeen explained, would jump-start a campaign of civil disobedience by providing financial support for the families of Iranian opposition and dissident leaders, enabling them to step up their campaign of resistance against the Iranian regime. Once the U.S. government saw the mass demonstrations, Ledeen said, it could then be persuaded to seriously back a regime change initiative.
"I think you can buy yourself a free Iran now for $20 million," Ledeen added. He also advised the audience on tactics to increase their lobbying influence in Washington.
Some Iranian-Americans in the audience were dismayed by Ledeen's talk of the ease with which the oppressive Iranian regime that had driven most of them from their homeland could be overthrown. "It was insulting to every person sitting in that room," said one Iranian-American journalist in attendance, who asked that his name not be used. "If it's such an easy thing to overthrow a government, then why have the Iranian millionaires not done it themselves?"
Among Iranian-Americans, there's both a fascination and a wariness about neoconservatives such as Ledeen — as well as considerable uncertainty about what, if any, role the diaspora itself should play in any democratic revolution in Iran.
"I believe the future of Iran is in the hands of the Iranian people," the Iranian-American journalist said. "The young people who have been sacrificing their lives, and their families."
The Ledeen initiative shows the contradiction of the neoconservative worldview: While seeking to liberate and empower the peoples of the Middle East it also makes them pawns in a historical drama in which they have little voice. The execution of this sort of radical foreign policy vision has often run roughshod over the details, as the aftermath in Iraq has shown.
No one is advocating a U.S. invasion of Iran at the moment, although clandestine support to Iranian opposition groups is on the table. For Iranian-Americans, the present question is whether their home country should become a sequel to Iraq or if there is a way to democratize Iran without Washington's heavy hand.
Heer, who is based in Toronto, frequently writes for the Boston Globe and the National Post. Laura Rozen reports on foreign affairs and national security issues from Washington, D.C.
To quote the San Jose Mercury News:
"One of the commanders, identified by officials simply as Chizari, was the third-highest-ranking official of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Al-Quds Brigade, the unit most active in aiding, arming and training groups outside Iran, including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, U.S. officials said. The other commander was described as equally significant to Iran's support of foreign militaries but not as high ranking."
The US decision to release these high raking Iranian officials is striking for several reasons.
First, these Iranian officials, especially Chizari , would be knowledgeable not only about specific Iranian attacks being planned but of Iranian terrorism plans across the board in Iraq, including political activities. The US released Chizari before undertaking an interrogation to gain access to his information. By doing so, the US has put US military and civilian personnel at risk. Iran can now move ahead with previously planned attacks with the awareness that US forces US will not be alerted.
Second, for this reason, the US military did not approve of the decision to release these high ranking Iranian officials, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Who did approve this decision, in effect overriding the standing policy on interrogations established by GEN Casey? The authority to override GEN Casey could not come from Ambassador Khalilzad, who has no authority over US military personnel in Iraq. Was this decision to override GEN Casey made by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who speaks for President Bush?
Third, how extensive is the cooperation between US civilian officials, including Ambassador Khalilzad, with Iranian officials involved in planning terrorism, as well as with Iraqi supporters of the Badr Brigade including Abdul Aziz al-Hakim? The US military has no such contacts with the Badr Brigade and Hakim or it would most likely not have staged the raid on Hakim's compound in the first place, where several Iranian and Badr Brigade officials were detained. Moreover, the US military would not have objected to the release of Chizai and officials and insisted upon access to their information.
In short, has a split emerged in US policy on terrorism in Iraq with the US military opposed to Iran, the Badr Brigade, and Hakim, while US civilian officials, backed up by the White House and State, are in favor of US contacts with the Badr Brigade and Hakim?
Moreover, is State's support for the Badr Brigade tied to State's support for Hakim's ambitions to replace Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister. In the past several weeks Hakim has been involved in extensive negotiations with Iran and with other Iraqi political parties to ease Maliki, who is backed by Muqtada al-Sadr, from power. Only the last minute opposition from Ayatollah Sistani has preserved the Maliki government from falling in the face this Iranian-State Department campaign.
To be even more specific, is the Badr Brigade, supported by Hakim and Iran, planning to stage a coup in Baghdad against the Maliki government? Are the detained Iranian officials aware of this coup planning? Is this why the Iranian officials are not being questioned and have been released into Iran�s custody? Are the 20,000 new US troops for Baghad, part of the Bush Administation's "surge" strategy, to be used to protect the new Hakim pro-Iran government?
The Sunday Times April 09, 2006
Bush’s salon revolutionaries plot an Iran coup
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky
Washington think tanks are pushing for the toppling of another regime
For me the alarm bells began to ring in the unlikely surroundings of the ancient Trout Inn near Oxford. A senior Republican party foreign affairs insider, as hawkish as they come and a staunch backer of the Iraq war, made a bitter complaint about the incompetence of George W Bush’s international policy. If my Republican friend is so critical, I thought, the US president must be in real trouble.
The seriousness of his difficulties is shown by the way in which the American administration is courting an unlikely stage army of salon revolutionaries who are promising to provide a painless way to get rid of the nasty regimes of the “axis of evil” in Iran and North Korea.
Peter Ackerman, the very rich chairman of Freedom House, and his International Center on Nonviolent Conflict are engaged in a huge propaganda campaign designed to show how the worst of regimes can be toppled by the methods used — or claimed to have been used — to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and in the “colour” revolutions that led to pro-western regimes in Ukraine (the orange revolution) and Georgia (the rose revolution).
Political street protests led by organisers trained secretly in the West and supplied with nifty communications gadgets are capable — so the argument goes — of ousting dictators.
But are conditions in Iran the same as those that followed the elections in Ukraine in 2004? Do street protests and similar techniques always work? The disastrous experiences of Tiananmen Square, of Prague in 1968 and Hungary in 1956 are conveniently overlooked. Nor does the State Department have many good ideas about how to spend the $75m recently allocated to promote democracy in Iran. The bulk of the money will be spent on radio broadcasts to be beamed into the country.
In the normal course of events it would not be worth considering the delusional arguments of Ackerman and his supporter Michael Ledeen, a journalist based at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who was a central figure in the notorious Iran contra affair during President Reagan’s administration. But President Bush and Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state, have both addressed meetings organised by Ackerman’s Freedom House in the past two weeks. There are many other signs that the policy of promoting revolution and regime change in Tehran is gaining ground in Washington.
The US president is very much in a “last-chance saloon” mood as he made clear recently to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. If he is to solve the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions he must achieve his objective before he leaves office in January 2009. So he is turning to a policy of subversion combined with plans for military action. There is convincing evidence that US diplomats are pressuring Turkish authorities to agree to the use of its main air base for attacks by American B-52 bombers on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Since my time as an adviser to the policy planning staff of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and as a founder governor of the invaluable Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), I have enjoyed close contact with Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This body and other US organisations that promote democracy are worried that the secretive and subversive activities advocated by Ackerman, and being pressed for with some success on Capitol Hill, at the Pentagon and in the White House, will taint their past 20 years of international activity.
The projects of the NED — like those of the WFD — are funded by government but are transparent. They are not subversive. And they have played a positive role in encouraging democracy in dozens of nations. Respected members of the Iranian exile community in America are also worried that the attempted subversion of the regime in Tehran will backfire, consolidating support for Iranian hardliners and preventing regime change for the next 30 years.
Nevertheless, the seriousness of the underlying problem of nuclear proliferation cannot be denied. Nor will it be possible to negotiate successfully with regimes such as President Ahmadinejad’s unless there is a credible threat of the use of force. However long remains before Iran acquires a military nuclear capacity — itself a matter of uncertainty and misinformation — America and the West will need to decide whether they are prepared to tolerate an Iranian nuclear bomb and if they are willing to countenance the spread of such bombs to increasing numbers of unsavoury regimes.
Criticism of the Bush administration’s policy is not based on the fact that it is considering a military option against Iran. Any government needs to do this if it is to negotiate with Ahmadinejad
The problems are, first, that there seems to be no strategic thinking about the prospect of nuclear proliferation. Is it to be tackled by containment (as used against the Soviet Union and China in the cold war)? Or is it necessary to prevent proliferation, even if this requires military action as a last resort?
Second, the US administration lacks consistency. It has come to terms with the North Korean bomb. It is actively supporting India. It necessarily remains on good terms with Pakistan. Foreign policy obviously requires realism and pragmatism. It also requires some consistency of doctrine.
Third, Bush’s Washington still pays far too much heed to some of the wilder propagandists based in think tanks. Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI (for which I once wrote a scholarly volume on British political history) are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.
Finally, the Bush administration needs to ensure that the transparent, positive activities in the field of democracy promotion conducted in many countries by the NED and by a network of publicly funded bodies are not made casualties of the battle against nuclear proliferation.
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky is a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems in Washington
Andrew Sullivan is away
Date: 11/22/2004 04:40:50 By JEET HEER and LAURA ROZEN Houston Chronicle
$20 million for a coup in Iran? :Overthrow Tehran? Hey, Not So Fast
With President Bush elected to a second term, and the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war firmly in the driver's seat of U.S. foreign policy, Iranian-Americans are contemplating a stark choice similar to that faced by Iraqi-Americans a few years ago — whether they want to work with Washington to liberate their home country.
Although almost all Iranian-Americans want to see democracy flourish in their native land, there are intense and divisive debates on how to achieve this goal and what a future Iranian government should look like. These debates are certain to grow only more intense in the coming months, as Iran's accelerating nuclear program vaults it to the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
The activities of Michael Ledeen, one of the most prominent of the Washington neoconservatives advocating that the United States back a plan to overthrow the mullahs, illustrate some of the complexities of modern-day regime change.
Trained as a historian, and now the "Freedom Scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of the National Review, Ledeen first came to public prominence during the Reagan administration. While serving as a consultant to national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, he became entangled in the arms-for-hostages trade that became part of the Iran-Contra scandal. It was Ledeen who brought the U.S. government into contact with the Parisian-based Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, who claimed he would be able to win the release of U.S. hostages held in Lebanon by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in exchange for U.S. weapons.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Ledeen has resumed contact with Ghorbanifar, as he has set about gathering information to lobby the Bush administration, private constituencies and public opinion to back a plan to destabilize the Iranian regime and support dissident forces. In a December 2001 meeting in Rome, first reported in Newsday, Ledeen introduced Ghorbanifar to two Pentagon officials interested in discussing the regime change idea.
In June 2003, one of those Pentagon officials, Harold Rhode, went to meet Ghorbanifar in Paris for further discussions — a meeting the Pentagon originally said was the result of a chance encounter.
On April 21, 2003, in the final days of the major combat operations in Iraq, Ledeen traveled to Los Angeles, where he spoke to a group of about 200 Iranian exiles. The event was organized by the owner of a Los Angeles-based Persian radio station, said to be sympathetic to the monarchists (the people surrounding the late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in a Washington suburb).
"The Iranian diaspora is one of the richest diasporas in history," Ledeen told the audience, according to a tape recording of the event. "So as you contemplate the future of Iran, think first about how to organize the Iranian community and diaspora to raise money for Iranians in Iran to stage democratic revolution that we all know can succeed."
The private money, Ledeen explained, would jump-start a campaign of civil disobedience by providing financial support for the families of Iranian opposition and dissident leaders, enabling them to step up their campaign of resistance against the Iranian regime. Once the U.S. government saw the mass demonstrations, Ledeen said, it could then be persuaded to seriously back a regime change initiative.
"I think you can buy yourself a free Iran now for $20 million," Ledeen added. He also advised the audience on tactics to increase their lobbying influence in Washington.
Some Iranian-Americans in the audience were dismayed by Ledeen's talk of the ease with which the oppressive Iranian regime that had driven most of them from their homeland could be overthrown. "It was insulting to every person sitting in that room," said one Iranian-American journalist in attendance, who asked that his name not be used. "If it's such an easy thing to overthrow a government, then why have the Iranian millionaires not done it themselves?"
Among Iranian-Americans, there's both a fascination and a wariness about neoconservatives such as Ledeen — as well as considerable uncertainty about what, if any, role the diaspora itself should play in any democratic revolution in Iran.
"I believe the future of Iran is in the hands of the Iranian people," the Iranian-American journalist said. "The young people who have been sacrificing their lives, and their families."
The Ledeen initiative shows the contradiction of the neoconservative worldview: While seeking to liberate and empower the peoples of the Middle East it also makes them pawns in a historical drama in which they have little voice. The execution of this sort of radical foreign policy vision has often run roughshod over the details, as the aftermath in Iraq has shown.
No one is advocating a U.S. invasion of Iran at the moment, although clandestine support to Iranian opposition groups is on the table. For Iranian-Americans, the present question is whether their home country should become a sequel to Iraq or if there is a way to democratize Iran without Washington's heavy hand.
Heer, who is based in Toronto, frequently writes for the Boston Globe and the National Post. Laura Rozen reports on foreign affairs and national security issues from Washington, D.C.
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