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The back door to Tehran
The U.S. is clandestinely courting
rebel forces bent on regime change
27-07-2006
ADNAN R. KHAN
Ousting leaders and replacing them with ones more friendly to American
interests has been part of U.S. foreign policy for decades. It is one of the
Bush administration's overarching obsessions, first in Iraq, perhaps in
Syria -- and in Iran, as that country continues its push for nuclear
weapons. But while the latter is in Washington's crosshairs, even more so
given its involvement with Hezbollah, regime change in Iraq has proven that
sometimes dictatorial power can hold a country together, while suddenly
removing it risks the onset of civil war. Iran is, at least in theory, not
much different. In Washington's view, though, the fundamentalist regime in
Tehran must go. As Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the Senate foreign relations
committee in March: "So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a
nuclear weapons program, at least clandestinely."
With negotiations aimed at
halting Iran's nuclear ambitions in limbo, pending Iran's response to a
package of incentives offered by the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia
and Germany, some feel time is running out. Threats of economic sanctions if
Iran fails to comply, which might destabilize the regime over the long term,
fail to address the concerns of a growing cadre of U.S. officials. Despite
expert opinions to the contrary, including a 2005 estimate by the U.S.
intelligence community concluding Iran could be up to 10 years away from
acquiring enough fissile material for a bomb, many U.S. hard-liners
surrounding George W. Bush are convinced the Islamic nation is very close to
producing a nuclear weapon.
The consensus among this influential group is regime change, now. But how to
go about it in Iran? An all-out invasion is off the table -- at least for
now -- because of the quagmire the U.S. finds itself in in Iraq. A tactical
military strike aimed at Iran's nuclear and security infrastructure, coupled
with an internal revolt headed by opposition groups, could be an option. And
the wheels may already have been set in motion. According to Seymour Hersh
in a controversial article published in the April 17, 2006, issue of The New
Yorker, sources inside the U.S. military say combat troops are already
clandestinely operating in Iran, tagging targets for future bombing missions
and buying the co-operation of local tribes.
Bush has strongly denied Hersh's allegations. But Maclean's has learned
that, for some time, U.S. officials have been courting anti-regime
revolutionary groups, many if not all of them ethnically based, that are
operating along Iran's porous border with Iraq, encouraging them to step up
their agendas.
There is no paucity of Iranian ethnic groups -- fully half of the country's
population is made up of minorities -- and no shortage of rebels to choose
from. But their different agendas may not include a vision for a
non-fundamentalist Iran that is unified and stable. And in a region already
rife with sectarian violence, pursuing a policy that might result in further
ethnic strife is a dangerous game.
Sulaymaniyah, 275 km north of Baghdad near the Iranian border, is the
regional headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political
party of Iraq's current President Jalal Talabani. In the surrounding area, a
variety of anti-regime groups have been given refuge for years: the Iranian
Communist, Democrat and Labour parties all have camps in the region,
complete with military training facilities. All say they have been
approached by the Americans.
"We meet with the Americans regularly," says Muhammad Nazif Khadiri,
spokesman for the Democrats, an Iranian-Kurd party working in exile from
Coya, a village approximately 150 km northwest of Sulaymaniyah. "It's no
secret. We even have a presence in Washington." The party's agenda, like
that of the Americans, is regime change in Iran, by any means possible. It
is vague about its vision for the future. But if the party's history is any
indication, a unified Iran does not figure in it: in 1946, the group
orchestrated a revolt in western Iran and briefly set up a Kurdish nation
that was toppled 11 months later by, ironically, the American-backed regime
of the Shah.
Closer to Sulaymaniyah are the headquarters of the Iranian Labour party,
also Kurdish and envisioning a loose federalist system based on ethnic lines
in a future Iran. Members say they have been carrying out military
operations in Iran, although they will not elaborate. And the party is blunt
about its relationship with the U.S. administration. "We attended the
conference in Washington at the end of May," says spokesperson Reza Kaabi,
referring to a meeting of Iranian opposition groups held in the U.S. capital
earlier this year. "Since that meeting, we've been considering increasing
our clandestine military activities inside Iran."
Of the opposition groups that agreed to speak to Maclean's, only the
Communist party said it has rejected Washington's request for assistance.
"We told them we are only a political party," says secretary-general Ebrahim
Alizeh. "We do keep a military wing, but its function is to keep the threat
of force alive. Any military intervention in Iran, and we emphasized this to
the Americans, would only benefit the current regime."
The Communists were not
invited to the May conference. Other ethnic opposition groups were: the
Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, the Azeri-led Diplomatic Commission
of Southern Azerbaijan, the Balochistan People's Party, representing the
Baloch people who live mostly at the southeast border with Pakistan, and the
Ahwaz Human Rights Organization, from the Arab minority in the southwestern
Iranian province of Khuzestan. That conference promoted a united front to
topple the regime, although the participants are all tight-lipped on details
of what was discussed in Washington.
Now, the increased instability as a result of the nuclear standoff has
provided fertile ground for agitation. Azeris, the largest of Iran's
minorities, represent up to a third of the population. They hold some senior
posts in the regime -- Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Azeri. But
proportionally, Azeris are still politically and economically marginalized,
and the Azeri opposition has become much more vocal, with demands for
autonomy and even outright secession. "The rhetoric of the Azeri minority in
Iran has never been more militant than it is today," says political
scientist Abbas Vali, director of the University of Kurdistan Hawler in
Irbil, capital of Iraq's Kurdish region.
Azeris have even taken to the streets in violence, after a recent incident
in which an Iranian newspaper cartoonist depicted them as cockroaches.
Still, according to Vali, "The Azeris have too much to lose right now to be
a serious threat to the Persian-led regime." But he cautions that they could
become more militant. "If Iran's ethnic rivalries escalate in the future,
and if the regime falls," Vali says, "they will pose a real danger to
stability."
For the moment, it's the Kurdish groups, with their camps lined up along the
Iranian border in Iraq, that pose the greatest threat to Iran. That's a fact
the U.S. hasn't missed. The militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which
has been fighting a bloody insurgency against Turkey since the mid-1980s in
the hopes of establishing a Kurdish homeland, has been using the slopes of
Qandil mountain, approximately 130 km north of Sulaymaniyah, as a home base
from which to launch attacks against both Turkey and Iran. The PKK is a
threat to the region's territorial integrity, as it hopes to carve a Kurdish
homeland out of sections of Iran, Turkey and Iraq. And the PKK has
apparently been recruited by the U.S.
Rustam Joudy, one of the group's senior leaders, initially denied that. "We
have nothing to do with the Americans," he said. But locals living alongside
the PKK contradicted him. "The Americans were coming here regularly six
months ago," said one villager. "We don't know why. The PKK leadership never
talked to us about it." When confronted with such allegations, the PKK
leadership drastically modified its earlier comments, admitting that they
not only met U.S. representatives in the past, but that these meetings
continue. "They have stopped in Qandil," a spokesman told Maclean's, "but
these meetings continue in other places. As for their purpose, that's
strategic. I cannot tell you why."
After repeated requests for a comment, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad issued a
terse denial: "The report that U.S. government officials are meeting with
PKK representatives is false." But the mere fact that the PKK and others
continue to operate in Iraq shows they are of use to the U.S., says a former
PKK member who would identify himself only as Raoof. "The Kurdish
revolutionaries are a threat to Iraqi Kurdistan's stability as well," he
says. "And yet, they are still here. If the Americans didn't have a use for
these groups, they would not let them remain in Iraq."
The Kurdistan regional government (KRG) is trying to keep itself above the
fray. "It's wise for the KRG to keep its distance on this issue," says one
member of its parliament and a senior member of Talabani's Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan party, requesting anonymity. "Leave it to the U.S. and Iran.
The Iranians came to us to discuss the issue. We told them that it's not our
problem. It's your problem. But do you think we don't know what's going on
there? Of course we know." Like Raoof, he also noted that the fact that the
PKK and others are still operating in Qandil reinforces the conclusion the
U.S. wants them there. "Obviously there is a strategic advantage," he says.
As for U.S. involvement with a group that the State Department has placed on
its list of terrorist organizations, the parliamentarian says that is
acceptable. "We are in a devil's circle," he concludes.
Professor Vali, for one, says that the current nuclear standoff, coupled
with the U.S. strategy toward Iranian rebel groups, could be "regionally
disastrous." Iran, through experience, believes that a belligerent attitude
reaps more rewards. During Mohammed Khatami's moderate presidency from 1997
to 2005, the path of reform and reconciliation that Iran took, albeit slow
and laboured, received little in return from the world community. Hard-line
regime loyalists have learned from that. Under international pressure, they
will, as they are doing now, "push the situation to the brink," Vali says.
Should the antagonism between Washington and Tehran reach a tipping point,
followed possibly by the collapse of the regime and the sectarian strife
that is sure to follow, Vali fears a new regional conflagration. Turkey is
his main concern; with a de facto Kurdish nation already established to its
south in Iraq, another autonomous Kurdish region to its east in Iran would
almost certainly provoke it to act, with potentially dire consequences.
Divide and conquer may be the approach the Bush administration has chosen
for Iran. The problem is, that policy could end up dividing much more than
it conquers.
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