Battling sanctions

If history is any indication, Iran can robustly face the covert war being waged by the West to effect regime change primarily by causing an economic collapse.

in Bahrain

PREOCCUPIED with the Presidential election, the United States seems to have stepped back from targeting Iran for a military strike. The drop in the momentum for an overt war has coincided with the dominance of the domestic agenda on the eve of elections. The chronic recession in the American economy, the frustratingly high unemployment rate, and the confusion about recovery plans have, for the moment, taken centre stage.

Yet there are no signs of any strategic shift in American thinking towards Iran. The pause in the escalation of military tensions has been matched by the surge in the covert war that threatens not only Irans leadership but also its citizenry.

For the moment, causing the collapse of the regime through an implosion to bring about regime change seems to be the U.S. administrations preferred strategy. Achieving military goals by not risking American lives but through indirect means has been the hallmark of President Barack Obamas leadership style. That has meant ordering drone strikes, even if they have killed more innocent civilians than terrorists in the badlands of the Hindukush mountains or Yemens treeless wadis (valleys). Expanding the scope of sanctions that have denied food and medicine to ordinary working people rather than hurt governments has come naturally to Obama, who does not seem to want future historians to tag him as a war President.

Delisting MEK

Not very different from the policy of pushing in proxy terror groups to battle the Syrian government, the Americans have opened the door for another extremist group to take on Iran with even greater ferocity. On September 28, the U.S. delisted Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), Irans visceral enemy, as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO). The de-listing was possible after Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, passed classified information files to Congress, which made the change. This has freed the MEK to operate against Iran with far greater freedom and vehemence than at any time before.

The MEKs involvement in terror acts in Iran against the regime of the Shah and, subsequently, the post-revolution Islamic government is well recorded. Violence traced to the MEK in the 1970s also killed at least six Americans.

The relations between the Iranian government and the MEK became irreconcilable after the groups suspected involvement in the horrific Hafte-Tir bombing in Tehran. On June 28, 1981, a powerful bomb went off in the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party (IRP). In a single stroke, it wiped out the cream of the Iranian leadership. Among the 73 killed was Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, the second-in-command then after the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian Revolutions leader. In the Iran-Iraq war that followed a year after the 1979 revolution, the MEK allied with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The MEKs star rose when it took credit for correctly revealing the existence of Irans secret underground uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. The animosity between the Iranian government and the MEK grew even stronger in subsequent years. The Iranians accused the group of masterminding the killing of five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007.

The MEKs deep-rooted ties with highly influential individuals and cabals that have been pervasively interactive with the American establishment seem to have played a part in the U.S. letting the organisation off the FTO hook. Did money play a part in the removal of the terror tag on the MEK? In all likelihood, yes, as borne out by a report in The New York Times. According to the story, senior former officials and politicians, including top guns from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who have lobbied forcefully for its de-listing, are likely to have benefited from the MEKs financial largesse.

Among former officials who have spoken for the MEK at conferences are two former CIA Directors, R. James Woolsey and Porter J. Goss; a former FBI Director, Louis J. Freeh; a former Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey; President George W. Bushs first Homeland Security Secretary, Tom Ridge; President Obamas first National Security Adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; as well as prominent Republicans, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City Mayor, and Democrats like Howard Dean, a former Governor of Vermont, The New York Times reported. The story went on to say that by way of remuneration, the fees have ranged from $15,000 to $30,000 for a brief speech, though some invitees have spoken free.

Israeli role

Some bold investigative reporting in a section of the U.S. media has unearthed covert ties linking the MEK, the Americans and Mossad, the Israeli spy agency. In their report on NBC television, Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, quoting U.S. officials, reveal that the attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israels secret service. They point out that the attack was often carried out by motorcycle-borne assailants, who attached magnetic bombs to the cars of their victims. The report claims that the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement. The NBCs investigation mostly coincides with the Iranian assessment that the MEK has long benefited from Israeli funding. Israel is also said to be playing its part in managing recruitment and providing logistical support to the MEK.

Going beyond the revelations of the NBC, veteran investigative writer Seymour Hersh has pointed to the camouflaged but direct U.S. official involvement in the training of the MEKs cadre, despite its erstwhile status as an FTO. In his article in The New Yorker titled Our men in Iran?, Hersh details the involvement in 2005 of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in training MEK members in communications, cryptography, weapons and small-unit tactics at a base in the Nevada desert in the U.S. There are several nuggets of information in the article about the nature of the U.S.-MEK collaboration. Hersh quotes Massoud Khodabandeh, an information technology expert and an MEK defector, as saying that at one point of time the U.S. had managed to break into a major Iranian communication systems. After that, the U.S. provided MEK operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iranwhich MEK operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts.

Hershs article also brings to light the three-way tie-up between the MEK, Israel and the U.S. One of Hershs sources tells him that covert operations are primarily being done by MEK through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.

The green light shown to the MEK to accelerate its subversion openly complements the vicious economic war that Washington and its allies have mounted against Iran and its people through sanctions and financial curbs. This kind of economic warfare not only targets the government but also seeks to establish harsh conditions that will provoke the people to revolt. Quoting an unnamed intelligence official, The Washington Post reported: In addition to the direct pressure sanctions exert on the regimes ability to finance its priorities, another option here is that they will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realise that they need to change their ways.

On test

Much would now depend on the Iranian governments ability to navigate through its growing difficulties. The capacity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deal with the crisis, which affords no errors, is already on test. At the beginning of October, the rial, the Iranian currency, fell by 40 per cent after panic set in following the Iranian central banks ruling that only a limited amount of dollars would be available for purchase at a subsidised rate. This triggered small economy-centred protests among merchants in Tehrans grand bazaar. However, many took advantage of the occasion to cite their political discomfort with the Ahmadinejad administration, accusing it of financial mismanagementa sentiment that has begun to amplify within Iranian society.

Economic warfare

Economic warfarein conjunction with the cyber war that has targeted nuclear facilities as well as assassinations of scientistshas emerged as one of the most important tools in the Western armoury to engineer regime change in Iran. Iran is the ultimate prize of this policy, which has already toppled leaderships that have defied the imperial diktat and pursued an independent internal and foreign policy course.

On the pretext of promoting democracy, Empire has pursued its geopolitical agenda by targeting major holdouts of resistance in West Asia. Saddam Hussein was removed in 2003 as was Libyas Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 behind the smoke screen of the Arab Spring.

Currently, ordinary Iranians are being subjected to considerable economic hardship. Many small businesses depending on the import of essentialsshops and restaurants includedare folding up because of poor profit margins. Iranian students studying abroad and dependent on funds from their families are finding it hard to pay tuition fees because the country is no longer a regular part of the international banking system. Oil exporters, carpet weavers and pistachio cultivators have all been badly hit because Irans central bank has been targeted by the West. The eventual goal of this war is to undermine public confidence in the government so that its legitimacy is permanently impaired.

Notwithstanding its bombast, the Wests success record on regime change has never been 100 per cent. The Lebanese Hizbollah, Irans ally, proved too strong to succumb to a full-scale war that Israel unleashed against the group in 2006.

Syria, another Iranian ally, is battling foreign jehadists backed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and its Arab allies intent on toppling the secular government of President Bashar al Assad under the pretext of pursuing a humanitarian war.

Can Iran withstand the heavy onslaught of a covert war that is being waged to effect regime change, primarily by engendering an economic collapse? Having withstood a stream of challenges including a costly eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s that was meant to uproot a fledgling revolution, there is little doubt that the Iranian system will once again demonstrate its robustness to ride out the storm. Iran has already drawn out plans to strengthen its domestic economy and consolidate its ties with Asia as the gateway for trade and energy exports.

Despite the sanctions, China has continued to expand Iranian oil imports. It has also extended credit lines and consumer items to Tehran, helping to fill the breach that had been exposed by the European Unions decision to advance Irans economic isolation. India, Malaysia and Japan are the other Asian heavyweights that have persisted with their energy relationship with Iran, notwithstanding restrictive Western pressures.

Preparing to leverage its advantageous trade location, Iran has decided to pump in $25 billion to develop the Chabahar port, which can emerge as the gateway for trade with landlocked Afghanistan as well as Central Asia. Another $4 billion is to be spent to develop other ports in the country.

Iran is also eying an exponential expansion of domestic industry fed on energy that will be brought in by 15 new pipelines that are planned. Blessed with abundant resources and a young and intelligent workforce, Iran, if guided by an energetic and efficient leadership, can emerge as a stable society and vibrant economy enmeshed more closely with a rising Asia rather than an arrogant West, which is blind to its own internal decay as exposed by a chronic economic recession.