Last week, the “Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act
of 2017" received a rare and near unanimous bipartisan vote in Congress.
The legislation placed more sanctions on the Iranian regime. It called for
extending terrorism-related sanctions on the notorious Islamic RevolutionaryGuard Corp (IRGC), Iran’s violators of human rights and its missile program,
which is increasingly threatening world peace. It was signed into law earlier Wednesday.
This coincided with the second anniversary of the Iran nuclear
deal. President Donald Trump has
appointed a team in the White House to figure out how to deal with the
agreement, but his administration has also correctly pointed out that the
broader implications of that deal have by no means been positive.
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Critics of the Obama administration’s
conciliatory Iran policy understood that when sanctions relief was narrowly
focused on the nuclear issue, Iran would be emboldened in other areas. They
were right. Today, the regime is escalating its nefarious activities in the
region, even carrying out several illicit ballistic missile tests in violation
of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
In contrast to the dictatorship, the Iranian people are
overwhelmingly educated, pro-democracy and seek to live in coexistence with the
outside world. Understandably, they have a keen awareness when it comes to the
threats presented by the regime.
The opening to the regime by the West was illusory, as President
Hassan Rouhani will not oversee a period of "moderation" in Tehran.
Western policymakers should take into account the Iranian people when
designing Iran policy and look at the organized opposition, which is
ready and capable to change the regime from within.
Had any Western executive body wanted the input of
progressively-minded Iranians, they could have visited Paris
on July 1 to
hear from what a speaker described as approximately 100,000 of them at the
international gathering for Free Iran.
The NationalCouncil of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) President-elect MaryamRajavi applauded the international community in her speech for
beginning to turn away from the conciliatory policies that had been adopted in
the run-up to the nuclear agreement. Rajavi urged the U.S. and the rest of the
world to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization, ousting it from
regional conflicts and pursuing human rights charges against Iranian officials
who participated in a massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, mainly the
activists of the main opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) in 1988.
The recent congressional consensus on Iran
addresses many of such demands, i.e., subjecting the IRGC to terrorism-related
sanctions, imposing additional missile sanctions and subjecting human rights
violators to sanctions. The congressional language needs to be followed up by
the administrations to do the following:
First, all the key entities and commanders of
the IRGC and its affiliated groups need to be identified and subject to the
sanctions under executive order 13224. Second, the IRGC and its affiliates must
be expelled from the region, particularly Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Third, the list of rights violators must
include all the key elements who ordered, facilitated and carried out the
massacre of 1988. Finally, the organized opposition, which has been the main
victims of repression, as well as the best hope for change, should be heard and
their rights recognized to make a free Iran a reality.
If similar measures had been undertaken when
the 2009 uprisings occurred, the show of international support very likely
would have bolstered efforts to oust the clerical regime and establish a
democracy in line with the secular and democratic principles long advocated by
the NCRI.
The Free Iran rally exuded the promise that
change in Iran is within reach. Several thousand protest actions have been
recorded throughout Iran over the past year, even as the regime’s domestic
crackdowns have escalated. The simmering resentment toward the regime is
growing ever closer to spilling over into another mass uprising.
When the Trump administration is finished
evaluating its post-nuclear deal policy on Iran, it would be a sharp departure
from the past if these new realities on the ground are taken into
consideration. It is time to recognize the right of the people for a free,
non-nuclear and secular republic in Iran.
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