More Iran Stuff

Iran Press News has a story reprinted form FrontPageMagazine.com by Kenneth R. Timmerman. In his piece, Getting Iran Wrong – Again, Mr. Timmerman rips both the Press and the Careerists at State (may favorite people) as the ones that are just getting in the way of the Administration's desire to do the right thing in Iran.

The story starts here:

Washington Post reporter Karl Vick, reporting from Tehran this week, trumpeted that the new U.S. strategy to help pro-democracy groups inside Iran “could backfire,” by tainting activists as American agents.
“We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush,” he triumphantly quotes an Iranian “human rights activist” as saying.
The only problem is, the “human rights activists” and “pro-democracy” folks Karl Vick quotes are nothing of the sort. They are members of the discredited “reformist” movement, which ruled Iran from 1989 until last year.

And just gets worse:

It’s absolutely critical that we get Iran right. On one side, we have a fake Iranian “resistance” group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which has jinned up a massive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. They are hoping to convince Congress to get the Administration to lift the State Department’s designation of the group, which dates from 1994, as an international terrorist organization.
“Imagine the message that would send to the Iranian people,” one administration official who is appalled at the MEK lobbying efforts told me.
“So we’re telling them they should be ruled by some crazy terrorist cult?” As I reported recently, the MEK helped bring Khomeini to power in 1979, but had a falling out two years later over how to share power. Call them Iran’s Trotskyists, if you will.
Sazegarah believes the main tool the U.S. should use is political recognition of the opposition. He urged a boycott of last year’s presidential elections, as a first step toward convincing the international community to reject as illegitimate Iran’s Stalinist-style elections. The reformists, on the contrary, are still hoping to change the face of the current regime, to make it more palatable to the West. The CIA has also fallen for Iranian maskirovka, repeating year after year in unclassified intelligence assessments that “no viable opposition” exists in Iran. This is strategic deception at its best. You’d think that the few Cold Warriors left at Langley would teach their younger colleagues the old Soviet tradecraft.

You know that the more things change the more they stay the same.

As Benjamin Netanyahu once said;
The Communists did irrational things for rational reasons,
The Islamists do irrational things for irrational reasons.