![\"Maryam](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Maryam-Rajavi-with-Free-Iran-gathering-2018-1.jpg\" "\\"Maryam")
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Senator Robert Toricelli, a former member of the United States Senate representing New Jersey, who has been working with the Iranian Resistance for more than three decades has written an essay in the book \u201cIran Democratic Revolution,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0published<\/a> by the International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ). Below is the first part of Senator Toricelli’s essay:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The uprising of the Iranian people, which broke out on September 16, 2022, once again elevated the Iranian crisis into a major international headline. Girls and women challenged the ruling system, displaying unparalleled courage. Within a few hours, the protests against the murder of a young woman grew into an uprising against the entire regime, spreading all over the country.<\/p>\n The world is facing new realities in Iran, which accentuate the imperative to alter international policy towards it. What is needed is a thorough overhaul. The time for such change is now, not a year or six months, or even a month from now. Change is long overdue.<\/p>\n William Shakespeare’s “what’s past is prologue” can be instructive here. When President Jimmy Carter addressed the Shah in Tehran on December 31, 1977, proclaiming “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” he could not have even imagined that exactly one year later, in January 1978, the Shah would be forced to flee the country and in February, the monarchy would be overthrown permanently. Even in the fall of 1978, CIA analysts assessed that Iran was “neither at the revolutionary stage nor even at the pre-revolutionary stage.” Such assessments surfaced even when the US had an embassy in Tehran and over 50,000 Americans were operating in various capacities across the country.<\/p>\n Similarly, in 2022, the uprising has taken Western governments and analysts by surprise. The conventional wisdom in Western capitals has been that the regime of the ayatollahs is virtually invincible and the prospect of regime change inconceivable.<\/p>\n Such thinking has served as the foundation of Western policy towards Iran for many years. On this basis, the only effective way to deal with the regime was to cajole and compromise with it. Ironically, the more the clerical regime intensified its repression inside Iran and its export of terrorism and insecurity abroad, the more the West sought to appease it.<\/p>\n In November 1979, for the first time in modern history, a government of one country took hostage the diplomats of another. Some 52 diplomats and foreign nationals were held hostage for 444 days by the Iranian regime. It claimed the hostage takers were students but they were, in fact, “Followers of Imam,” the Supreme Leader\u2019s political party.<\/p>\n In subsequent years, further malevolent actions were taken by the regime. Besides the assassinations of opponents, the atrocities include: the killing of 241 American marines and 58 French soldiers, and six peacekeeping civilians in Lebanon in October 1983; the hostage-taking of Western nationals in Lebanon; terrorist bombings in Europe throughout the 1980s; bombings in Arab countries, Africa and Latin America in the 1990s; and the horrific bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia<\/a> in June 1996, which killed 19 and injured nearly 500 Americans. The Iranian regime\u2019s continuing terrorism, as well as its violent intervention in the Middle East, now, as in the past, has not been met with any serious countermeasures by the West. Even more disturbing, the West made conscious efforts to cover up or downplay the role of the Iranian regime in acts of terrorism.<\/p>\n On April 10, 1997, after a court in Germany explicitly emphasized the role of the highest officials of the Iranian regime in the murder of four opponents at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, European Union members recalled their ambassadors from Tehran and the EU announced that it would not allow intelligence agents of the Iranian regime to set foot on European soil. But not even this halfhearted policy survived for long, with normal relations and concessions to the regime resuming in November of that year.<\/p>\n Western policy has not improved since.<\/p>\n In 2018, the security services of Belgium, Germany, France, and Luxembourg, in a joint operation, neutralized a bombing plot against the annual rally of the National Council of Resistance (NCRI) taking place in the suburbs of Paris. Supervised by Assadollah Assadi<\/a>, a senior Iranian diplomat serving in an EU country, the regime’s plan was to explode a bomb in the heart of Europe, at a rally attended by tens of thousands of ordinary Iranians as well as prominent dignitaries from Western countries.<\/p>\n In response, the European Union was content with placing two regime officials on the terrorist list without taking any concrete or meaningful actions against the regime as a whole. Even after the Antwerp court sentenced the diplomat to 20 years and his three accomplices to 17 and 18 years in prison, and even after documents and evidence presented in court showed that the bomb was brought to Europe in a diplomatic pouch from Iran, the Europe Union again refrained from taking any practical measures. Apparently, the Iranian regime has complete political immunity from the West.<\/p>\n Western governments of course would deny that they have a policy of appeasement towards Iran. Instead, in public, policy is rationalized by the claim that there is a moderate faction within the regime that can be the source of positive, if gradual, change in the regime’s behavior. Every President, bar one, has been presented as a quiet opponent of the Supreme Leader. In the face of the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\u2019s close ties to the Supreme Leader, a new rationale emerged: the benefits to the West in reaching an agreement on Iran\u2019s nuclear program would outweigh other considerations. Agreed during the Presidency of Hassan Rouhani, the West hailed as a great achievement of the nuclear agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). At the same time, the West claimed its inaction against<\/p>\n Iran\u2019s terrorism was actually a policy aimed at keeping the\u00a0\u201chardliners\u201d in the regime at bay through rapprochement. Opponents of the policy were named \u201cwarmongers\u201d.<\/p>\n The West\u2019s claim that a moderate faction existed in Iran has been completely undermined by protests in Iran since 2017: the Iranian people chant, “Reformists, hardliners, the game is now over.” During the current uprising, the population has shown that they despise the supposed “reformists” as much as the \u201chardliners,\u201d blaming the former for having long played the role of the regime’s safety valve.\u00a0 Even Mohammad Khatami hailed in the West as the most moderate of all Iranian Presidents, voiced support for the regime’s policy of suppressing the uprising.<\/p>\n Another rationale presented by the West was that regime change was impossible in the context of Iran\u2019s military power. The presence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps<\/a> (IRGC) in particular left no possibility of change by the people. Thus, the rationale went, the only option was to wait for reform from within the regime. The rationale has its parallel in the 1970s when it was claimed that the strength of the military protected the Shah.<\/p>\n The IRGC will stand with Khamenei until the bitter end. However, no military force, regardless of its power, can withstand the will of its own population. In any case, the IRGC is riven with corruption, and, in the face of the uprising, with disenchantment, particularly among its mid-tier and lower-level personnel.<\/p>\n Still, another rationalization of Western policy towards Iran is that the regime has a stable social base among the lower classes of society. This perception was shattered in November 2019 with the uprising of the lower classes. At that time, protesters set fire to thousands of regime-affiliated centers. These were the very “disadvantaged” people that the regime had claimed to be its core constituency. Of course, Khamenei suppressed the uprising by killing 1,500 people. But the world clearly observed the dissolution of the regime’s base among underprivileged classes.<\/p>\n The final rationale deployed by the West is that having overthrown one despot, the Shah, in pursuit of democracy, and having been rewarded with another tyranny, the Iranian people do not desire another revolution. The current uprising invalidates this argument: the protestors shout, “This is no longer a protest, it is a revolution.”<\/p>\n Behind the rationales lay political and economic interests, of course, but it is also worth examining the sophisticated operation that is the regime’s lobby in the West. Individuals working under the cover of researchers and academics promoted the notion that there are moderate elements inside the regime. Ostensibly independent research projects have been funded by elements affiliated with the Iranian regime. Many universities in the US received such financial aid from the Alavi Foundation<\/a>. Iran has also organized professional lobbies, such as NIAC in the United States. It is widely despised by Iranians.<\/p>\n The missing link in Western, and especially American, policy towards Iran was the failure to listen to the voice of the Iranian people and the democratic opposition. This repeats the error committed during Shah’s era.<\/p>\n Worse, not only did Western governments not listen to the voice of the people, but in order to appease the mullahs, the main opposition, the MEK, was designated as a terrorist organization – by the US in 1997 at the request of the regime. The United Kingdom and the European Union followed suit a few years later. After a long legal battle, the Court of Appeal in the United Kingdom, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and finally the Court of Appeal of the District of Columbia in the US delisted the MEK, testifying to the legitimacy of the organization. However, the policy has had serious and longstanding impacts.<\/p>\n Less than two weeks after the MEK’s listing in the US, I wrote the following to President Clinton: \u201cI write to bring to your attention a serious policy mistake in the making. On October 8, 1997, Secretary Albright issued a list of 30 groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations. On that list were many groups which merited such designation. One that did not was the People\u2019s Mojahedin Organization of Iran<\/a> (PMOI).<\/p>\n \u201cOur country was born in resistance to oppression. Surely our foreign policy in its fight against terrorism can distinguish between political movements fighting to preserve their values and oppose tyrannical regimes and those which target innocent civilians. I have reviewed personally the intelligence purporting to justify the designation of the PMOI as terrorist and find it unpersuasive.\u201d<\/p>\nThe International Community\u2019s Role<\/h2>\n
Rationales for appeasement<\/h3>\n
The missing link<\/h3>\n