Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing our old friend, Mohammad Sahimi.
He is a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
Go Bruins.
But he's a great critic of American Iran policy and expert on Iran's nuclear program and the ins and outs of Iranian politics, as well as the American politics of Iran and everything in between.
And here he is at Loblog, the great Jim Loeb's blog, Loblog.
And the article is Pompeo, Bolton and Iran's fake opposition.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me back in your program.
Very happy to have you here.
And boy, so what an interesting time.
Donald Trump is saying, hey, let's get out of here.
Let's get out of there.
But let's see if we can pick a fight with Iran.
So, of course, pulled us out of the nuclear deal, which thank goodness the Iranians so far have refused to take the bait there.
They're still in the deal with the rest of the Security Council powers who made the deal with them, the JCPOA.
So at least we got that going for us so far.
But I guess we don't know, do we, the extent of Trump administration support, CIA, NED money or what all.
I think we know some from The Wall Street Journal and other places.
But there are one, two, three many Iranian national congresses, so to speak, Chalabi-like organizations of Iranian exiles pushing to have their place in America's regime change plans in Iran.
And this article you do such a great job of taking us through and explaining who these guys are.
But I guess first I should ask you, how serious is the push by the Trump administration to support these groups, do you think?
I think it is, the push is quite serious.
They are spending a lot of time, effort and energy into this.
They just met with two of the figures among this type of opposition that they call fake opposition.
Mike Pence met with one of them and Pompeo met with another one.
And this is all in the run-up to the so-called Poland summit next week, supposedly to talk about stability in the Middle East, but actually aimed at Iran and what Iran does or doesn't and so on and so forth.
And at the same time, we have to remember that Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and so on, they are also interested to steal trouble.
Of course, we all know that the New York Times reported that last year, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates discussed a plan for spending $2 billion to destabilize Iran, Iran's economy to steer ethnic tension in Iran and even assassinate Iranian leaders, including Major General Bassem Soleimani, the commander of the Oath Force.
So there are all sorts of factors playing in this thing.
And of course, we should never forget what Israel and its lobby do in the United States.
So I think it's quite serious.
Now, whether this will lead to war, I don't know.
Certainly, I am very, very concerned about this because, you know, the last thing that we need is another war in the Middle East, and particularly with Iran, not only because Iran is my native land, but also because I think if, God forbid, a war starts with Iran, all other wars in the Middle East so far would be child's play compared to war with Iran.
And it will set the whole region further into chaos and fire and, you know, killing people and so on.
And not only that, but it will also damage world economy because, you know, all exports will be threatened.
And I'm sure Iranian armed forces, whether we like them or not or whatever they do, they will respond as strongly as they can.
And therefore, God forbid that, you know, they attack Iran.
Some people believe that it won't happen.
Some people believe that it will happen.
Tim Loeb himself has published a couple of pieces in which he expresses his opinion that the U.S. is moving towards war in Iran.
There are other analysis that says, no, I personally don't know which way we are going, although I tend to be on the side of those who think that war will not happen, because the Pentagon is well aware of what Iran will do and how Iran will respond.
And they don't want to end the war with Iran, but we will have to wait and see what happens.
Yeah, I mean, I'm with you on that.
I think it seems from the outside like, yeah, they still want a regime change, but they think that they can get one by other means.
I mean, even the Bush years, the plan wasn't really – I mean, they wanted some strikes in 2007 and see where it goes, but they were not determined to have a regime change by war.
And it seems doubtful.
As you say, the Pentagon knows that eventually they would win, I guess, if it was a full-scale war.
But they know, as you say, that Iran is in the position to do a lot of damage and retaliation in the event of a real conflict there.
So then that's where we get to all of this CIA, NED, and the rest of the regime change machine, and their efforts – and the Treasury Department – and their efforts to figure out how to do some kind of push inside Iran.
And that's where you write this article about all these exile groups who are all pushing to be at the top of the list there.
So I don't know.
You want to just go through, starting with the MEK, and talk about – I guess first of all, describe who are these groups and how much political power do they really have in the U.S.?
We're all familiar with MEK.
I mean, this is an organization that has been exiled since 1981.
They worked with the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War.
The former leader, Massoud Rajavi, in a speech in the 1980s, boasted about how his organization killed 57,000 Iranian soldiers at the front of Iraq through the attacks at this stage from Iraq against Iranian troops at the border.
And, of course, it worked with Israel about Iran's nuclear program.
Many believe that it also worked with Israel in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, and so on.
And because of all of this, it is really despised by all Iranians.
Regardless of which Iranian you talk to, whether he's a supporter of the Mullahs or he's a monarchist or he's a leftist, they all despise MEK.
But unfortunately, in this country, the neocons and war mongers, whatever you call them, have worked with MEK, and have also helped it to survive and even thrive in the U.S. political scene.
Aside from that, then we have the monarchies that look to the son of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah, Reza Pahlavi, as their leader.
And Reza Pahlavi has had long-term links not only to Israel lobby, but also to Saudi Arabia.
We also know that in the 1980s, the Reagan administration, from 1983 to the end of 1988, he received significant funding from CIA.
I also know other aspects of what he has worked.
He had volunteered in 2003 to give a speech at the annual meeting of AIPAC.
And in fact, AIPAC people told him that it would not be good if he speaks at AIPAC, because that would destroy any prospect for him for leadership among Iranian people.
And he has also called for Saudi Arabia help, Israel help, to bring so-called democracy to Iran.
I say so-called democracy because I don't know what type of democracy would be if Saudi Arabia or Israel have a hand in it.
So that's another faction.
Then there are other smaller factions.
One is called Farashgard, which in Farsi means revival.
This is basically a group of 40 to 50 relatively young people that started their work when they were still in Iran, and then they all moved to the United States and Canada and began supporting – this happened during the George W. Bush administration.
So they began supporting Bush's policy towards Iran.
During the Obama administration, they were basically more or less silent because they didn't agree with President Obama's policy towards Iran, working with Iran, trying to reach nuclear agreement and so on.
But from the moment that Trump was elected, they came back to the scene.
They have issued so many statements.
They wrote a letter to President Trump asking him to impose economic sanctions on Iran, asking him to force Iran to stop its missiles program and so on and so forth.
They also look to Reza Pahlavi as their leader in their statements.
They have always said that they think that he can lead the opposition against the ruling group in Tehran, and they have also been promoting him very heavily.
But none of these groups have any significant social base of support in Iran.
For example, the monarchies and Freshgate called on Iranian people, and there was very, very heavy propaganda about it in the cyberspace and many, many television stations in Los Angeles and in Europe, calling on Iranian people to demonstrate on two occasions in January and late December.
But nothing happened.
There was no demonstration whatsoever anywhere in Iran on those days.
And as I said in the article that was published on Low Blood, that in fact ignited a very fierce debate among them, because that really revealed how empty their rhetoric is regarding the support of Iranian people.
Now, I just want to mention this.
When I say Iranian people don't support them, it doesn't mean that Iranian people support the hard-liners.
They don't.
In fact, as I say at the beginning of my piece on Low Blood, there is a true opposition in Iran, and this true opposition in fact has a very extensive base of support within Iran.
It basically constitutes all political groups that want a better future for Iran, from reformists to religious nationalists to secular leftists to labor unions to human rights activists.
And they are all active in the opposition to the hard-liners, but at the same time they oppose economic sanctions, military threats, and intervention by the United States and its allies in the region in Iran's internal affairs.
I myself am one of them.
I support the internal opposition.
I want the hard-liners to go away.
I want the IRGC to go back to Barack and only preoccupy itself with defense of Iran and not intervene in politics or the economy.
But I want them, I want this to happen at the hands of Iranians living in Iran without any outside intervention.
So we shouldn't confuse the fact that Iranian people don't support the exile opposition group with saying that they actually support the hard-liners.
They don't.
In addition to these, there are other groups or other people, other figures that are also active.
Saudi Arabia began this television station based in London about a year and a half ago, for which they basically paid, according to my sources in London, some of my friends who live in London and are in contact with these people, they told me that Saudi Arabia provided a budget of $260 million to start this television station that would broadcast into Iran.
And it was supposed to become Iran's version of CNN, broadcasting news 24 hours a day.
And they hired a lot of these Iranian journalists that live in exile, and they spend lavishly on this.
But many, many revelations were made, including by myself.
They dig out all the documents when they registered this television station in Britain, who supported it, who provided the funds, and so on.
And then The Guardian also published a couple of excellent articles showing the connection between the television station and Saudi government.
And therefore that also sort of becomes discredited.
Then there's another television station also based in London.
It's called Manwato, which means us, you and us.
This is a monarchist television station.
It also has a very big budget.
They spend lavishly.
They have all sorts of programs.
But they support very hard line against Iran.
And therefore these are also active in this.
And, of course, in Los Angeles here we also have many television stations that broadcast into Iran, but they have lost all credibility.
When they started working like 20 years ago, a lot of people were watching them.
But it gradually became clear that these people only advocate the lines that hard-liners in the United States or Israel or Saudi Arabia or, you know, all the foes of Iran advocate, and therefore they become discredited.
Now there is also this so-called New Iran Foundation that was started by this guy, Ali Reza Nader, who used to work for RAND Corporation.
And he left RAND last year, and suddenly he announced the formation of New Iran Foundation in Washington, D.C.
And I don't know where he got his budget from, but I do know that he also seems to have a very big budget because he hired six permanent staff.
He has very nice offices in a very nice neighborhood of Washington.
And he has this board of advisors and a board of directors, among whom, if you look at, you will see people that have worked for a long time with the Israeli lobby, for example, Nader Oskouyi, who has been at the Washington Institute.
He worked at Washington Institute.
He also worked for Central Command that, you know, as you know, that leads all the U.S. forces in the Middle East.
He also met with MEK representatives in the United States, and in particular Ali Reza Jafarzadeh, who runs MEK operation, political operation in the United States.
So that's one of them.
Then there is another young guy, Shay Khatiri, who has worked at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, another Israeli lobby, and also has done some research at Washington Institute.
And he also belongs to that other group that I mentioned, Farashgard, you know, one of their members.
And if you look at his Twitter page, he says that he's the new Paul Wolfowitz of Washington, and of course we all know who Paul Wolfowitz was.
So there are all sorts of groups that are involved in this.
All of them are competing for funds by CIA, State Department, National Endowment for Democracy, Israeli lobby, and so on, and all of them seem to have pretty good budgets.
They all spend lavishly.
They all have, you know, big websites.
They basically control cyberspace, Twitter, and Instagram, and so on among Iranian community.
They have hundreds of people whose job on a daily basis is just sending tweet messages, Twitter messages, and so on.
And in fact, one guy did research about some of these Twitter messages that they send, and it seems like they have used robots to send the same message again and again and again because, for example, one account has sent one message 400 times in a single day.
And in fact, Al Jazeera, the website Al Jazeera, published a very good piece several months ago in which they had done extensive research about this, and they showed that, you know, this is basically a robotic operation where, you know, it set this up and they send the same message again and again and again.
They have hashtags like regime change in Iran or, you know, support Poland summit or free Iran and so on.
So all sorts of factions, groups are active.
But again, I emphasize none of them, even the MBK, which is the best equipped, the best funded, and the oldest, has any significant support within Iran.
But, okay, it is Washington, it is Trump administration, Israel lobby, Saudi Arabia lobby, and they do what they can to get their funds and continue their operations.
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All right, now, so when it comes back to your preference, you prefer factions that are, I guess, the moderates within the current establishment there.
Is that a reference to Mousavi and the Green Revolution types?
Oh yeah, of course.
I supported the Green Movement.
I have always supported the reformists.
And in fact, because of the many, many, many articles that I published on Tehran Bureau between 2008 and 2012 in support of the Green Movement and the reformists, I have basically, I cannot go to Iran anymore because the intelligence units of IRGC have a big case against me.
And I actually became aware of it by accident because what happened was a friend of mine went to Iran in 2007, and he was arrested and was in jail for many, many months, and he was interrogated by the intelligence units of IRGC.
He was eventually released after about a year, and he came back to the United States, and he told me that don't go to Iran.
When I asked him why, he said because when he was in jail, they were interrogating him.
They also asked him a lot of questions about me and told him that they know who this guy is and what he does and so on.
There were also some Ahmadinejad supporters in the United States during the Green Movement, and because of all those articles that I wrote in support of the Green Movement and against Ahmadinejad, they had reported me to the Ministry of Intelligence in Iran.
And in fact, I have several former doctoral students who live in Iran and are faculty at various universities, and the Ministry of Intelligence had actually gone after them because they had scientific collaboration with me, and they had summoned them to the Ministry of Intelligence and asked them what they do with me and what I tell them and so on, and they all had said that they had gotten scared, of course, because they had been summoned by the Ministry of Intelligence.
So I haven't been to Iran for many, many years because of that, but I support whatever this true, what I call the true opposition in Iran, which is basically a vast coalition of various groups, do in order to push the hard-liners to get IRGC out of politics and economy, to open up the political space and eventually eliminate the theocracy and establish a secular republic where people can vote freely and elect their representatives.
All right, so yeah, let's focus on this distinction here.
I mean, I think I understand you, but I want to be clear.
You're not saying that the legitimate opposition are the people that you support and everybody else is the illegitimate opposition.
You're saying that the distinction is not your opinion of the different groups, but whether they take foreign money and receive foreign support.
And that really puts you in line with the opinion of the Iranian people too, who, whichever side of politics they're on in Iran, they're never on the side of anybody who's in the pocket of the Americans, the Israelis or the Saudis.
What kind of patriot would work with a foreign government against their own government, even in the worst of circumstances, right?
I totally agree.
Even among monarchies, there are very good Iranian patriots that are totally opposed against taking money from the United States or Saudi Arabia or Israel.
They are against military threats against Iran.
They may support some form of economic sanctions.
I would support economic sanctions if it didn't hurt ordinary Iranians and only hurt those organizations that use repression against Iranian people.
But nobody has been able to come up with a scheme whereby ordinary Iranians, and I must mention that all of my family, my own immediate family and my greater family, and that of my wife, they all live in Iran.
I don't have any relatives here.
So the distinction is not whether I agree with the philosophy of a certain opposition group or not.
The distinction is whether you are working for Iranian people to change their system of government or whether you are trying to advance the agenda that Trump administration, Saudi Arabia and Israel and so on and so forth, have for Iran.
Saudi Arabia has said, you know, the government officials, including Mohammed bin Salman himself, he has said that they want to take war inside Iran.
They have said that they have published officially maps of Iran in which they have partitioned Iran into five smaller countries.
They have supported some terrorist groups inside Iran, like the Baluchis that operate in Sistan and Baluchistan province on the border with Pakistan.
And there was these terrorist attacks in Iran's province of Khuzestan several months ago.
And immediately after that terrorist attacks, some officials of United Arab Emirates praised it.
So if any Iranian or any Iranian faction wants to work with, you know, such governments, they can no longer, as far as I'm concerned at least, they can no longer refer themselves as Iranian or working for Iranian people.
So the distinction is not whether I agree with the philosophy of this group.
The distinction is whether we want to change the system in Iran on our own or whether we are basically puppets of, you know, foreign governments and take funds and whatever else that they gave them to advance their agenda rather than, you know, being concerned about the plight of Iranian people living in Iran.
All right.
Now, so when you go down the list of the MEK and the Pahlavis and this new group created by the Rand Corporation, all these guys, do you know who is the CIA's choice there?
Or they're all still deciding who they want to try to push?
Or they really know what you just said, which is that they cannot replicate 1953 right now.
With all the sanctions in the world, they can't destabilize Iran enough that they're going to let America put a new Shah in there or anything like that.
So what do you think they think they're going to do?
All right.
I think within the Trump administration, there are like two factions.
One wants Reza Pahlavi as so-called leader of opposition, and one wants to rely on MEK.
We all know that Bolton, John Bolton, the national security advisor, has been in lobbies for MEK for many years.
He has taken money from them, and he has given speeches to them.
And in fact, in June of last June, he said that this February, the month that you are in right now, will be the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.
And he hopes that by this time, the regime in Tehran will be overthrown.
So Bolton has always supported MEK, has met with its leader and so on.
At the same time, if you look at the programs of Voice of America, the Persian part, the Farsi part, and I discuss this in detail in my article, ever since President Trump was elected, before even he started his term, suddenly Voice of America changed direction.
Before that, they would bring people from all factions to discuss their views about Iran, from reformists to these opposition groups and so on.
But as soon as he was elected, Voice of America changed direction completely and began supporting 100 percent the monarchies and Reza Pahlavi.
They interviewed him.
They promote him on their website all the time.
They bring his supporters to their various programs.
And then the director of the program, who is a lady called Setareh Rakhshesh, she began interviewing, you know, Iran hawks in the United States, such as John Bolton himself and Pompeo and Michael Levin and Elliott Abrams and all of those.
We all know what agenda these people have.
And suddenly Voice of America, the Persian program, became, you know, where all these people come and talk about what they want to do with Iran.
So it seems like at least there are two groups or two factions, and they haven't even decided what they want to do.
There are other figures that are less known as MEK or Reza Pahlavi, but they also play roles here.
For example, there is Mohsen Sazegara.
He, during the revolution back in 1979, he was one of the lieutenants of Ayatollah Khomeini.
He was very young at that time.
And he even claims that he was one of the founders of IRGC at that time, back in 1979.
But he has lived in exile in the United States since 2006.
And during the Green Movement, he was very active, but in the way that he was claiming that he represents the Green Movement in the United States, which was basically false.
And he has worked closely with the State Department, at least.
So there are other figures here that are very well known within the Iranian community, but less known to outside the community.
I think their hope is Reza Pahlavi can, you know, can rise to the occasion, as they say.
But he hasn't shown anything that indicates that he's actually up to the task, at least as far as they are concerned.
And, in fact, there was a CIA report, I think just a very short while ago, to Congress, in which it was mentioned explicitly that none of the exile groups have any significant following in Iran, and none of them is capable of really doing the job of regime change.
Their plan, of course, has always been to incite, you know, demonstrations within Iran by putting economic pressure on Iran, and by, you know, these heavy sanctions and so on, so that people would demonstrate.
And, of course, people are suffering.
But the fact of the matter is, despite all of the suffering and despite the rampant corruption by the hardliners within Iran, which has contributed significantly to the present state of economy in Iran, in addition to the sanctions, Iranian people are actually quite wise and mature when it comes to politics.
They celebrated, you know, signing of the nuclear agreement with the United States, and, you know, 5 plus 1.
And they firmly hold Trump administration responsible for exceeding the agreement illegally.
Before he announced that he was leaving the agreement illegally, Iran economy had begun to grow.
And, in fact, the World Bank had reported that Iran economy had grown 6 percent in 2016, and they were projecting another 6 to 7 percent growth for 2017 and 2018.
But as soon as Trump announced that he intends to leave the nuclear agreement, a lot of European corporations that have signed major agreements with Iran to invest in Iran and create jobs, of course, and so on, they pulled back.
And that has contributed to raising unemployment, you know, increasing the inflation, and so on.
So there is great pressure on Iranian people.
But they are wise enough, and they recognize that these opposition, exiled opposition groups, are basically lackeys of these people.
And because they hold Trump administration responsible, and also Saudi Arabia responsible, for, you know, the reimposition of the illegal sanctions and exit from nuclear agreement, at least the middle class and parts of even the lower class is not willing to do anything that would give any excuse to Trump and his administration, you know, under the guise of, for example, humanitarian intervention or anything of that sort, like what they did in Libya and so on, to take action against Iran.
That was their plan, but it hasn't worked out.
As we have seen, many, many analysis have come out, with which I totally agree.
This plan will never work, because Iran is too big a country.
Iran is too resourceful.
Iran has been under one form or another of sanctions by the United States since at least 1987.
And therefore, it has a lot of experience on how to handle these sanctions.
Of course, there will be damage, and there is already damage.
And as I said, people are suffering.
But none of these will bring the regime in Tehran down.
And in fact, the saddest aspect of this is that all of this actually plays into the hands of the hardliners.
Because under the guise of threat to Iran national security, what they do is they increase the repression, they increase their control on the economy, and they try to silence the true opposition within Iran, which is pushing for peaceful transition to a better government, to a less corrupt economy, and so on.
And by threatening Iran, by imposing sanctions on Iran, they only strengthen the hands of hardliners.
And we all know that this is actually quite a general phenomenon.
Even in this country, when we had the terrorist attacks in September 11, 2001, we know that a national security environment was created.
Hardliners were on assent.
Even opposition to Iraq war was considered unpatriotic.
So even in the United States, where we have a democratic system in place, things like that happen.
Let alone in a country like Iran, which is not democratic, although they have regular elections, meaningful elections, but it's not really a democracy.
So that only makes the hardliners have a stronger hand against the vast segments of the population.
And that's the saddest part of this.
Absolutely.
Same as always, too.
And you know what?
We thought it was over, right?
They lifted the sanctions, they had a nuclear deal, and now here we are all over again.
Exactly.
I remember at that time, right after signing of the agreement, I spoke to you and you're asking, what do you think?
I said, well, things look good, but we have to wait and see.
You know, the Leverets always said this was their book, Going to Tehran, and I know you had some disagreements with them about the Green Revolution and so forth, but the premise of that book was a nuclear deal, even if you can get it, won't be good enough.
Because there's so many other supposedly outstanding issues between America and Iran that the hawks will use those in order to thwart the deal, which that seemed impossible after it was done.
But it turned out that they were right, that Obama needed, Trump now needs, yeah, right.
But the only answer was to go and shake hands with the Ayatollah and say the past is the past.
We're now going to adopt the Israeli strategy of the 1980s, which is to be friends with you.
Yes.
And, you know, there's this basically sort of a white paper that was published for Center for a New American Security, you know, Democratic Hawks, in which it recommends that the United States preserve the basis for long-term sanctions against Iran.
Okay.
So that, what they really mean is that these sanctions against Iran should never be canceled.
At most, they should be suspended.
So there is this, you know, hostility towards Iran that just doesn't go away.
And the reason is that, at least in my opinion and people like me, the reason is that the Islamic Republic, with all the terrible things that it has done, with all the deficiencies that it has, has an independent policy and is not willing to take orders from Washington.
And therefore, as long as they do that, there is hostility towards Iran.
Pompeo said it very explicitly a while ago in a speech.
He said, if Iranian people are going to eat, their leaders should listen to us.
Okay.
So that's just the gist of what they want.
They want, you know, a banana republic in Iran that just takes orders from them, carries water for them.
Why do they support Saudi Arabia?
Precisely because of this.
Why do they support the fascist regime in Egypt?
Precisely because of this.
I don't think for a moment that the regime in Egypt, for example, is any better than what we have in Tehran.
In Saudi Arabia, there is no election.
In Iran, we have elections.
There are meaningful elections.
They're not democratic, but they're meaningful in the sense that they have consequences, in the sense that there are real competition, in the sense that we have fierce debate in Iranian parliament.
So they don't even know what election is.
And yet, they, you know, shed crocodile tears for Iranian people, you know, for their human rights and for citizen rights.
And at the same time, they support a regime of Saudi Arabia that has been waging for four years a brutal war against a small, poor country like Yemen, supporting them.
They support the regime in Egypt that killed several thousands of people and overthrew a democratically elected government, as bad as that government could be or was.
But it was elected through democratic elections, and they overthrew it, and they support it.
They support United Arab Emirates, which is nothing but an absolute monarchy.
And they support all other sorts of regimes around the world that are far more terrible than anything that we have in Iran.
And yet, they shed crocodile tears for Iranian people and their human rights.
I don't buy this for a moment.
And whenever Iranian people have had some success towards moving a better government, you know, a more representative system of government, something has happened in the United States that has stopped it.
We had the victory of Mohammad Khatami in 1997.
He began a program of reform, but instead of the Clinton administration supporting it, they didn't lift a finger, and they just repeated the same rhetoric.
And when there was a huge pressure on them to do something to support Khatami, not directly, but through lifting some of the sanctions, what did they do?
They said that they lift sanctions on imports of Iranian carpets into the United States, as if that would make a, you know, a very major difference.
Or when we had the Green Movement in 2009, instead of just expressing moral support for Iranian demonstrators, but not try to do something that would give an excuse to hardliners to put down the demonstrators, Hillary Clinton goes on one of these U.S.-funded radio stations or television stations and says that if they ask us to help, like the way we did in Libya, we would have been happy to do it.
So they were waiting for some sort of signals so that they can attack Iran the way they attack Libya.
So all of this just plays into the hands of the hardliners.
All of this helps the hardliners in Tehran to continue what they have done.
And yet these exile groups play along, repeat the same, you know, rhetoric, repeat the same nonsense, just with the hope that they get their funds, they get their, you know, all sorts of things, all the goodies that they get so that they can continue what they have been doing.
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Follow through from the link in the right-hand margin on my page at scotthorton.org.
Well, and this is the thing too, when this quote where he talked about where Pompeo said, hey, if their people want to eat, you know, this is the same guy who loves the Iranians so much.
Yeah, he loves them to death.
Just blatantly.
Just think of that.
What if it was, if we were talking about Iran was threatening, I don't know, Iraq with, if your people want to eat, you better give in to all of our demands, right?
Or if Russia was saying that to the Ukrainians.
Imagine the alarm and the moral outrage in Washington, D.C. about something like that.
But then, so his excuse for that was, of course, that, well, you know, the Quds Force and Qasem Soleimani, he's the poster boy for the Quds Force, I guess, that as he put it here, the quote was, well, he travels around the Middle East causing death and destruction.
Well, that's a little vague.
Why can't he just say he's been traveling around the Middle East helping America fight the Islamic State in Iraq and fight the Islamic State in Syria?
And so what does that leave?
That means that Pompeo's mad that they've also been fighting al-Qaeda in Syria and America's policy is hands off al-Qaeda, just fight ISIS?
And that's supposed to impress me and you?
Yeah.
And this is the guy, Pompeo, who on a daily basis sheds crocodile tears for Iranian people.
This is the same guy who in 2014 suggested that 2,000 sorties over Iran, 2,000 bombings over Iran should be able to get rid of all Iran's nuclear program and major military bases and so on.
So this is the guy who advocated attacking Iran and bombing Iran.
And Volton is the guy who has always wanted war with Iran.
Remember in 2015, right before the nuclear agreement was signed, he published this op-ed in New York Times and said to prevent Iran bomb, bomb Iran.
He has suggested so many times that Israel should attack Iran.
He falsely claimed just a few weeks ago that the United States still believes that Iranian leaders have not changed their strategic decision regarding production of nuclear weapons.
And this is what International Atomic Energy Agency has reported, that despite U.S. leaving the nuclear agreement and despite the imposition of the sanctions on Iran, Iran has lived up to its obligations towards the nuclear agreement and has not done anything to violate it.
And even, you know, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Gina Aspel of CIA, they testified in Senate just a short while ago that Iran has lived up to its obligation and the nuclear agreement.
But yet, these people, Pompeo, Volton, and so on, continue to lie, their exaggerations, and shedding crocodile tears, while at the same time they are trying to do their best to hurt Iran, to incite war with Iran, and to start another war with Iran that God knows where the world would be if that war starts.
Well, and of course, as you talked about, you know, they want to focus on Soleimani and the Quds Force and the Revolutionary Guard and this and that, when, as you've talked about, the policy of the sanctions just turns the markets over to them and empowers those groups at the expense of everyone else even more.
And they know that, too.
But, you know, to the American hawks, Iranian moderates are the enemy.
They prefer to be dealing with Soleimani so they don't have to deal with him.
Exactly.
In fact, the exiled groups act the same way.
The exiled groups constantly attack moderate groups within Iran because they know that moderate groups in Iran are the most important to them going to power in Tehran.
They know that as long as there are moderate groups in Iran that support a bare government, support coexistence with the outside world, and so on and so forth, and as long as those groups have their present, you know, vast social network of support among Iranian people, there is no chance that they can get to power.
Therefore, if you look at what they do, you know, in the cyberspace, they attack them constantly.
When my piece was published a couple of days ago, they attack me constantly.
Fool's Errand.
Timed and the war in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us
