NCRI – U.S. Congressman Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, on Thursday addressed the threats posed by the mullahs’ regime in Iran during a strategic conversation on U.S. foreign policy at the Stimson Center.
Rep. Royce took part in the forum event with Ambassador Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr., a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs and current Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Stimson Center.
Rep. Royce said that the people of Iran are being “disenfranchised” by the mullahs’ regime.
He rejected the outcome of the regime’s sham Parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections in February, pointing out that candidates that were not loyal enough to the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were automatically disqualified.
“The election was in fact between the hardliners in Iran and the very hardliners in Iran. At the end of the day every one of those candidates was picked by the ayatollah,” he said.
U.S. policy towards the Iranian regime has not succeeded in changing Khamenei’s attitude, he said.
“If we look at the number of people put to death and the political prisoners in Iran last year, it was much higher than the year before. It is a number which is going up.”
Rep. Royce said he does not think the Obama administration should give the mullahs’ regime access to the U.S. dollar to stabilize their regime. The beneficiaries, he pointed out, would be the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is in charge of the regime’s ballistic missile program.
He urged the U.S. administration to “help the kids who left Iran to send messages into Iran,” encouraging them to strive for their rights.
In another part of his remarks, Rep. Royce pointed out that following a recent meeting he had with Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad he felt that the Iraqi Premier is under a lot of pressure from the Iranian regime.
“This is what we tried to tell them: Do not allow the [IRGC] Quds Force out of Iran to bring the Shia militia into the western part of Iraq to retake those villages” that have recently been liberated from the control of ISIS (Daesh, ISIL, Islamic State).
“The Sunni tribal leaders that we met with want to take their own villages back. Their people want to go back to their villages. They don’t want to hand it over to some Shiite militia headed up by a Quds Force leader like [Qassem] Suleimani,” Rep. Royce added.
Founded in 1989, the Stimson Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank devoted to addressing transnational challenges in order to enhance global peace and economic prosperity.