In the on-going saga of the American-Iranians scholars who have been detained by Iranian authorities and accused of participating in a plan to undermine the Iranian government, the US media has studiously avoided dealing with some deeper issues: is Bush's $75million "democracy promotion" fund actually being used to undermine potential improvement in US-Iran relations, to harm democracy activists in Iran, and to intentionally create obstacles in the way of improved US-Iran ties?
Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and Mohammed Sahimi have a new article about the American-Iranians detained in Iran and accused of seeking to undermine the Iranian government by accepting (or working for think tanks that allegedly accepted) US government funds that are intended to be used for the overthrow of the Iranian government.
The authors note:
The most important reason for the recent arrests, however, has to do with President George Bush's policy toward Iran. Last year, the administration requested and received $75 million from the U.S. Congress to, ostensibly, “bring” democracy to Iran...Thus, Washington’s policy of “helping” the cause of democracy in Iran has backfired. It has made it more difficult for the more moderate factions within Iran's power hierarchy to argue for an accommodation with the West, and has brought nothing but harassment and jail for the Iranian scholars, reformists and human rights advocates who not only want better relations between the U.S. and Iran, but are also pushing for reforms in Iran.
Other Iranian dissidents such as Akbar Ganji and Omid Memarian have similarly charged that the Bush administration's policy has been harming, not helping them.
But despite the op-eds by these Iranian dissidents, most of the US media coverage of the issue has been limited only to the "badness" of the detention, and the media have almost uniformly refused to delve any deeper into the issue to ask whether Bush's policy on Iran is actually harming the Iranian dissidents (with one sole exception) - and more importantly, they have totally avoided asking why the Bush administration would pursue a policy of democracy-promotion that even the Iranian democracy-activists themselves so vehemently oppose.
Yes, obviously arresting people and televising forced confessions on TV is bad (if even from a purely PR point of view! Forced "confessions" should have died with Stalin.) But their imprisonment is also partly a result of the Bush administration's democracy-promotion policy, which is backfiring and harming the pro-democracy movement in Iran according to the Iranians themselves . . . so why does the Bush administration insist on pursuing this policy which everyone warned would only backfire? After all, it is not as if the Bush administration was unaware of the negative consequences that the Iranian dissidents warned about. The Clinton administration characterized the funding of Iranian pro-democracy activists as a "Kiss of Death" since the recipients of the funds would be instantly tainted as servants of a foreign power (an accusation of particular sensitivity for all Iranians due to their history.) The Bush administration knows this too - and yet has happily delivered this Kiss of Death to the Iranian dissidents despite their warnings.
Why?
Here's why:
See, the authors of this policy in the Bush administration - and their shills, flaks, pundits and front-groups - aren't actually interested in the sort of actual democracy promption that the Iranian dissidents such Shirin Ebadi and the rest espouse. They don't really care if Iran is a democracy or not (note there's no democracy promotion fund for Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, for example.) What they're interested in is simply an overthrow of the Iranian regime - by force and violence if necessary (exactly contrary to the views of the Iranian dissidents themselves) - and the establishment of a docile, Israel-friendly puppet regime which is kept in power despite a lack of any democratic credentials, such as in Jordan or Saudi Arabia. In fact, a true democracy in the Mideast is probably bad for their interests and regional ambitions.
So, the Bush administration isn't particularly concerned if their "democracy promotion" policy backfires on the pro-democracy dissidents in Iran. In fact, the authors of this Bush administration policy are probably secretly pleased to sideline people like Ebadi and Ganji who have rejected the Bush administration's aggressive designs on Iran. Instead, some in the Bush administration want to embrace and promote discredited Iranian dissident groups who express unquestioning support for a US attack on Iran, such as the MEK terrorist cult. And, the Bush administration gets to also exploit the negative PR that comes with the reaction of the hardliners in Iran against their dissidents. So, its a two-fer for the Iran hawks in the Bush administration. These people want to spark a war between Iran and the US, and so they want to place obstacles in the way of improved ties. The "backfiring" of this policy is intentional and precisely what they want to happen.
Nor is any of this a secret, though the US media studiously avoids dealing with it. For example, Michael Rubin, writing for one of the prominent pro-Israeli, NeoCon "think tank" journals, simply dismisses the views of the Iranian dissidents (as if he knows what's good for them better than they do) and instead claims,
"Taint is often a far greater impediment in the mind of Washington policymakers than it is among authentic dissidents, reformers, and liberal activists in the streets of the Middle East."
Rubin also raises a strawman and claims that the crackdown on pro-demcoracy activists in Iran predated Bush's "democracy promotion policy" and therefore the policy can't be blamed for the crackdown - totally overlooking the fact that while the policy may not be the sole cause of the crackdown, it does nevertheless significantly legitimize and justify the crackdown. After all, imagine what would happen in the US if the tables were turned and the same American-Iranians were charged with secretly accepting funds from the Iranian government allocated to toppling the US government (answer: one quick ride to Gitmo!)
And the saddest thing is that the dissidents such as Ebadi and Ganji, who are so easily dismissed as "not authentic" by the likes of Michael Rubin, are supporters of a US-Iran dialogue and the improvement of US-Iran relations - which is why the NeoCons want them out of the way. Previously, the same hawks uniformly ridiculed the Iranian reformists' attempts to reach out to the US and have instead consistently pushed for confrontation on Iran.
You see, here's the bottom line: Israel does NOT want Iran and the US to get along. That would be a challenge to Israel's strategic primacy to the US. Israel does not want a stable and secure or democratic Iran either - for the same reason. So, their lobbyists are trying hard to prevent any improvement in US-Iran ties, and they are pushing for a war instead.
In short, the "democracy promotion" that the Bush administration has been pursuing is really meant to be a provocation and lead to the creation of obstacles in any improvement of US-Iran relations, at the expense of democracy promotion. This is another example of ideology trumping reality and of special interests in the Bush administration hijacking US foreign policy to serve their own agendas.
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