Iran: National Council of Resistance of Iran, a broad coalition of democratic Iranian organizations.
Betraying Iran’s democratic opposition
With the United States
poised to elect a new administration this November, an opportunity is emerging
for a fresh look at U.S. foreign policy toward Iran. What sort of Iran policy
would best serve U.S. and Western interests?
National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a
large and increasingly influential Iranian dissident organization that has
drawn the bipartisan support of several prominent U.S. political leaders,
including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former ambassador to the
United Nations John Bolton, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and
former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.
Led by its president-elect MaryamRajavi, NCRI drew an impressive 100,000 Iranian exiles to its annual conference
in Paris last month. Founded in 1981, two years after the 1979 Iranian
Revolution, NCRI is a political umbrella organization that represents diverse
Iranian political, ethnic, and religious groups. Its declared aim is to establish a secular democratic
republic in Iran that adheres to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
abstains from producing weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
With Iran currently
under authoritarian control by the country’s mullahs, NCRI’s goals are
admittedly ambitious. Yet, in many ways, NCRI is precisely the sort of Iranian
opposition organization that should be drawing supportive attention from the
U.S., especially if advancing much-needed political and civil liberties in Iran
is the goal.
The
U.S. had a golden opportunity to engage in such support in the 2009 Green
Revolution. Following that year’s fraudulent presidential election, some two to
three million Iranian citizens peacefully took to Iran’s streets to protest
electoral fraud and to call for democratic political reforms. It created a
showdown between a powerful, autocratic regime that was not inclined to
liberalize, even marginally, and millions of citizens who passionately sought
such reforms. The Obama administration, however, responded sluggishly and
unimpressively to the vast uprising, failing to support the protests even
verbally, much less with tangible U.S. support.
Comments
Post a Comment