RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran’s judicial authorities “continued to impose and carry out cruel, inhuman or degrading punishments that amounted to torture, including floggings, blindings and amputations. These were sometimes carried out in public.” At least one woman, Fariba Khaleghi, remains under a sentence of death by stoning. — Amnesty International.

What is worse, the vast majority of those put to death in Iran have not committed crimes that would be punished with that severity (or at all) almost anywhere else in the world, least of all in Europe, Israel, or 23 states (and the District of Columbia) in the USA.

Even before their trials, individuals accused of anti-state convictions are mistreated, tortured, kept in solitary confinement for months on end, and denied access to their families and lawyers. “‘Confessions’ extracted under torture were used as evidence at trial. Judges often failed to deliver reasoned judgments and the judiciary did not make court judgments publicly available.” — Amnesty International.

As for the mullahs, they brook no criticism from any quarter and intend to keep Iran and its people under their iron grip forever, even if that means putting to death every dissident voice.

At the end of December 2017, something almost without precedent happened in cities across Iran. It started in the largest shrine city of Mashhad, then moved to Kermanshah, which had not long before suffered a major earthquake in which some 600 people died and where survivors had been neglected by the state. After that, large-scale protests moved to Sari and Rasht in the north, the clerical city of Qom, then Hamadan, and by the December 29, Tehran itself. In the following days, people were on the streets across the country. Starting on the third day, protesters were challenged by massive turnouts of pro-regime marchers. Anti-government protests, which these were, had not been seen in this quantity since the brutally-crushed risings after the 2009 presidential elections. By January 2, at least 20 protesters had been killed and more than 450 arrested. It was reported on the same day that Iran’s Chief Justice, Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, claimed that protesters might be considered “enemies of God”, and executed.

On his website, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,

“accused unnamed foreign enemies of meddling in Iran’s affairs, using money, weapons, politics and intelligence apparatuses ‘to create problems for the Islamic system’. The clerical elite is congenitally incapable of admitting that native Iranians, chafing under their harsh rule, might have genuine reasons for civil unrest.”

President Hassan Rouhani, a fake “reformist”, identified these foreign enemies as “the US, the regime occupying al-Quds [i.e. Israel] and their cronies”.

Nothing deterred, US President Trump tweeted on January 1 that:

“Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama Administration. The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food & for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!”

Ironically, Iran’s receiving more than $100 billion in frozen assets succeeded in breaking the solidarity between the Iranian people and the Ayatollahs’ regime better than the sanctions did.

Without Iranian money, Hezbollah would not exist. At least, not exist as an Iranian foreign legion, militarily engaged against Israel and in other Middle East regional conflicts. Without Iranian subsidies, Hezbollah would be just a narco-mafia.

Hezbollah has developed deep connections to Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, directly to facilitate the distribution of drugs throughout the Middle East and the US.

In the holy city of Qom in Iran, on December 30, 2017, anti-regime demonstrators shouted “Death to Hezbollah”, “Aren’t you ashamed Khamenei? Get out of Syria and take care of us”, and “Not Gaza, or Lebanon”.

In an Islamic country, whose official slogan is “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, to see Iranian people shouting “Death to Hezbollah” is totally surreal.

By wishing “Death to Hezbollah”, Iranians demonstrators were not only protesting a “rise of the price of eggs” as the Ayatollahs’ propaganda machine tried to claim. The demonstrators were demanding that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spend Iranian money for Iranian people — and only for Iranian people.

Ironically, Iran’s receiving more than $100 billion in frozen assets for the hapless “nuclear deal” succeeded in breaking the solidarity between Iranian people and the Ayatollahs’ regime better than the sanctions did. During the tough time of sanctions, the Iranian people stood by their leaders. The people only broke with their leaders when they saw that the “liberated” money was benefiting everyone but them.

Is Hezbollah eating the Iranian people’s bread? The answer is yes, absolutely. Hezbollah is an Iranian foreign legion, a tool of an imperialist Shia war being conducted in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and against Israel. This Arab Shia army was created in Lebanon by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1982, right after Israeli defense forces expelled the PLO from Lebanon. The aim of this Arab Shia legion was to demonstrate to Sunni Muslim Arabs in the Middle East that Shia Iran was a better fighter against the “Zionist entity” than any Sunni regime.

For good or evil, we may see radical changes in North Korea in 2018.

The beefed-up United Nations sanctions by midyear could lead to widespread North Korean hunger, as well as the virtual end of the country’s industry and transportation.

In the past, the West had called off such existential sanctions and rushed in cash and humanitarian aid on news of growing starvation. Would it now if the bleak alternative was a lunatic’s nuclear missile possibly striking San Diego or Seattle?

To survive an unending trade embargo — and perhaps to avoid a coup — Kim Jong Un would likely either have to recalibrate his nuclear program or consider using it.

China has always been unwilling to give up pit bull North Korea as its client. The Kim dynasty has proved especially useful over the past 30 years for aggravating and distracting the Chinese communist government’s archenemy, Japan, and its chief rival, the United States.

Yet China is now worried that the Donald Trump administration is as unfathomable as the prior Obama administration’s strategic patience doctrine was predictable.

Beijing’s sponsorship of the rogue nuclear regime in North Korea could increasingly become bad business, given global anxieties over the many possible trajectories of North Korea nuclear missiles.

What are some likely scenarios for 2018?

1) The status quo. China may loudly proclaim that it is following U.N. commercial sanctions while it secretly offers just enough sanction-busting aid to keep Kim Jong Un afloat. It might use its leverage to force Kim to cool his nuclear rhetoric — even as it stealthily supplies embargoed fuel and food.

China would then hope that an amnesiac world would move on and accept a gentler-sounding (but still nuclear and thus useful) North Korea.

The status quo — North Korean missiles pointed at America’s West Coast — is clearly untenable. Yet never underestimate China’s faith in the therapeutic forces of Western appeasement to accept the unacceptable.

2) A Chinese solution. China would cut some sort of deal to remove North Korean missiles — or even the Kim regime itself through a coup or uprising — in exchange for controlling the future of North Korea. That would likely mean not allowing a democratic, free, Westernized, and unified Korean peninsula on its borders.

Other than disassociating itself from the future status of North Korea, the U.S. should ensure that it does not give any concessions to China to remove the nukes. Such an indulgence would only reward North Korea nuclear roguery and ensure that the cycle of the last three decades would be endlessly repeated.

3) Forced removal. Barring acceptance of the status quo or a Chinese solution, the U.S. would be forced to accept widespread malnutrition of the North Korean populace and a constant ratcheting up of pressures to eliminate Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.

Nicolae Ceaucescu and wife Elena were dispatched with extreme prejudice when the Romania people finally rid themselves of a duo so brazen in their greed and tyranny no writer of fiction would have dared invent them. It’s quite a story, not least the gullibility of leaders in the West.

Britain’s Islam-friendly politicians, led by London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, are campaigning to cancel Prime Minister Theresa May’s invitation to President Trump for a State visit in 2018. Britain has not always been so fussy about who gets a State reception. In the wake of a trip to Bucharest I’ve been researching the Communist-era dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife, Elena (left).

They were invited to Britain by Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1978. Callaghan pimped a reluctant Queen Elizabeth to meet them at Victoria Station, and put them up in Buckingham Palace. Ceaucescu even got a ride with Her Majesty in the State landau. They were accompanied by bodyguard General Ion Pacepa, who defected to the West a month later, and a clatter of Household Regiment cavalry. The Queen later described the visit as “the worst three days of my life”. She was required, among other indignities, to award him the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, subsequently revoked in 1989.

Ceaucescu came ostensibly “to make firm friends among Western nations”, as the newsreels put it, and to sign a £200-million deal to buy several British Aerospace BAC 1-11 airliners (predecessor to DC9s and B737s) and build scores more in Romania under licence for export to China and the Third World. His actual goal was to open British doors for Romanian secret service men, doubling as technicians, to steal airline, Rolls Royce engine and Harrier jump-jet technology, to be on-sold to Moscow notwithstanding Ceaucescu’s vaunted hostility to Brezhnev.

The airliner deal turned into farce. An entire assembly line was air-freighted to Romania to make six BAC 1-11s a year. At its peak the Romanians had 4400 skilled workers on the job. But the plane was already obsolete and actual production was no more than one a year. The two nearly finished planes were left to rot and rust after Ceaucescu’s overthrow. He also defaulted on the hard currency required and sought to pay in barter. The first shipload of Romanian strawberries was rotten by the time it reached the wharf.

In Bucharest I joined a tour of the Ceaucescus’ Primaverii or “Spring” residential palace, all of us especially slack-jawed at the indoor tropical garden built on top of a swimming pool, with infra-red heating equivalent to power 100 normal apartments. The pool’s rear walls comprise a million-piece mosaic of pretty fishes that took artists two years to complete. This was just one of his five official residences, 39 guest houses, 21 exclusive apartments in embassies, nine planes, three helicopters and three presidential trains. Plus the couple had a hospital reserved for themselves alone.

George Orwell was prescient about 1984. The Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceaucescu and wife Elena produced TV sets with two-way transmitters – you watched the TV and it ‘watched’ you, although even they must have know it was overkill, given the legions of flesh-and-blood informers.

Under the Ceaucsecu dictatorship, Romanians’ in the 1970s-80s were forced into abject poverty – only Albania may have been poorer in the Eastern bloc. People’s desperation for food and warmth was coupled with passivity enforced by the dreaded, mysterious Securitate, or secret police. In this essay, a follow-up to one earlier on the Ceaucescu couple’s personal lifestyle, I’ll describe living conditions and then the Securitate operations. These climaxed in the violent Christmas 1989 revolution, apparently faked-up by the Securitate as cover for installing their own people at the top. To this day, no-one knows what really went on.

The Liberty Center Mall in Bucharest looks like a classy Western shopping mall, with fashion brands, food, a 3D cinema and an ice skating rink. Who would guess it took over the site of one of Ceaucescu’s feeding stations for the city’s populace, dubbed “Hunger Circuses”.

The circus element was a dome on each of the five identical feeding complexes, similar to the city’s actual circus building. The dictator finished two, and three more were under way at the time of the Christmas 1989 revolution or coup, which left him riddled with AK47 bullets. Incredibly, his plan involved preventing Bucharest’s population from kitchen-cooking and family meals, in favor of regimented feeding by the state in giant soup kitchens, officially called “Agro-Alimentary Complexes”.

On Mondays, for example, everyone’s main meal would be, say, goulash; on Tuesday, cabbage rolls; and Wednesday, bean soup. Food shopping other than at the ‘circuses’ would be extinguished. New apartments wouldn’t need kitchens.

It’s unclear whether any Hunger Circus actually got to operate, or how state-sponsored meals could work during food austerity. As one interviewee recorded, perhaps in hypothetical terms, “You go there, you take your three little boxes, you go home, you heat them and eat them. The bad thing is that behind this project there was a terrible idea. Since everything can be found like this, there is no more need for markets for raw products.”

Ceaucescu viewed his subjects like a chicken farmer calculating inputs and outputs. People needed only 3000 calories a day, times the population of 22m. He could reserve the equivalent total of grains, rice, meat, and eggs for the population, leaving the rest for export to earn hard currency to pay off foreign debt. Romania had in 1981 defaulted on these US$11 billion debts after the Iranian oil shock of 1979 and Ceaucescu was determined to never again be dictated to by the IMF. He paid off the last foreign debts a couple of months before he was overthrown. He still spent on the military and his wasteful megaprojects such as the world’s biggest administration building, today 90% mothballed.

Iran has been racked for almost a week by nationwide protests and rioting over the rule of the mullahs—unrest that shows no sign of abating any time soon. What began as a protest against rising prices and an otherwise torpid economy has quickly turned into a full-blown national movement challenging the very legitimacy of the Islamic Republic itself.

We’ve been down this path before, of course. The short-lived “Green Revolution” of 2009 was the last time a popular uprising threatened the hardline theocratic government. Given the opportunity to back the protesters, President Obama chose to lead from behind and do nothing. Although President Trump has tweeted his support for the demonstrators this time, it remains to be seen what exactly the United States can do and how effective these protests will be in forcing political reform.

One thing is certain: the Islamic Republic’s days are numbered. This is a protest of the young from across the country versus the old elite in Tehran. Whether change happens now or in another decade, the rising generation of Persians largely reject the fundamentalist Shia Islam that has governed their country since the late 1970s.

Today, Iran’s city-dwelling youth are largely Westernized and well-educated. While many may still pray toward Mecca and believe in the Koranic teachings of their elders, they have created a natural separation between the secular world and the religious one (not unlike the sort of separation that exists in most liberal Western democracies today).

It’s true, as Michael Ledeen pointed out, that rural Iran remains more religious and traditional than their urban countrymen. But most of the unrest, in fact, has been in the poorer, rural, and more religious parts of the country. Rioters even burned a seminary in Qom, which is the center of Shia Islam. As one observer noted, “That’s comparable to anti-Catholic riots in Vatican City.”

But it isn’t just a cultural shift that signals the regime’s eventual demise. Fact is, Iran has a fertility crisis. At 1.68 children per 1,000 women (as of 2015), Iran is in the doldrums of an ongoing baby bust. David P. Goldman has argued that Iran’s demographic decline will lead to severe political instability. Iran’s “baby bust” coincides roughly with the life of the current regime—and it shows no sign of abating. In the face of declining economic opportunity and political repression, instability is likely to increase. Once it reaches a critical mass, Iran’s totalitarian theocracy will change.

Latin America and Africa have rarely rated as top U.S. foreign policy priorities in recent years, but 2018 may change that. Political instability and the collapse of national governments, international terrorism and its associated financing, and great power competition for natural resources and political influence could all threaten significant American national security interests next year. If several simmering controversies erupt simultaneously, Washington could find itself facing these crises with little or no strategic thinking to guide our responses.

In the Western Hemisphere, Cuba as of now is scheduled on April 19 to see the end of official leadership by the Castro brothers. Since seizing power from Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Fidel and Raul have embodied global revolutionary Marxism, defying U.S. opposition and repressing domestic dissent without compunction. But while loath to admit it, the Castros were always sustained by external assistance, by the Soviet Union until its 1991 collapse in turn prompted a near-terminal regime crisis in Cuba, and more recently by Venezuela’s dictatorship.

Moreover, despite Barack Obama’s revealingly ideological effort to extend a lifeline by granting the Castro regime diplomatic recognition, economic conditions did not improve and domestic political repression only intensified. Even beyond Cuba’s open contempt for Obama’s concessions, however, 2017’s still unexplained sonic attacks on American diplomatic personnel crossed the line. Denied by Havana but hard to imagine without its connivance, these attacks concentrated the new Trump administration’s attention. In November, the White House rolled back many of Obama’s changes, serving notice that harming Americans was unacceptable.

Now, with Venezuela on the ropes, the revolutionary legitimacy of the Castros set to disappear, and U.S. pressure increasing, how long the regime survives is an open question. Whoever follows Raul Castro may well be Cuba’s version of Egon Krenz, East Germany’s last Communist ruler after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

One major unknown is whether Vladimir Putin will see a strategic opportunity to reassert Russian influence in the failed Marxist paradise, or in other hemispheric weak points. Both Nicaragua (where, incredibly, the Sandinistas remain in power) and Honduras (which President Trump is trying to rescue from misguided Obama policies) are possibilities. While tensions will not likely return to Cold War levels, when U.S.-Soviet crisis over Cuba came close to igniting nuclear war, Russian meddling in Latin America could inspire Trump to reassert the Monroe Doctrine (another casualty of the Obama years) and stand up for Cuba’s beleaguered people (as he is now for Iran’s).

Venezuela’s tragic decline, first under Hugo Chavez’s comic-opera regime and now under Nicolas Maduro, his dimwitted successor, accelerated in 2017. A country that once had near-European living standards has seen its petroleum industry collapse through corruption, criminal negligence and lack of investment, with devastating consequences.

Protests have erupted across Iran. From the country’s relatively modern cities to its more remote, fervently religious areas, Iranian citizens are challenging the despotic theocracy that rules over them. The protests began as dissatisfaction with a faltering economy bubbled over. They have since mushroomed into large-scale demonstrations for political freedom, demands for the removal of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s head of state, and even expressions of nostalgia for Reza Shah, the founder of the old secular Pahlavi dynasty.

The protests are different in origin from the Green Movement in 2009, which broke out when, after the systematic election-fixing the regime engages in proved insufficient, the mullahs took the added step of throwing the election to then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet they present the most significant challenge to the regime since — and just as it did then, the clerical tyranny is cracking down. At least 21 people have been killed, and hundreds more have been detained.

The United States government should zealously support the protests against the tyranny of this regime. That would be a pointed departure from the approach of Barack Obama, who remained shamefully inert at the beginning of his term, despite the regime’s brutal crackdown on its people and the subsequent discovery of its secret nuclear facilities. Thus far, President Trump’s remarks are a good start. He has publicly criticized the regime ever since the protests gained steam, and tweeted that “the US is watching.” The Left has chided Trump on the grounds that his supporting the protesters will undermine their cause by allowing the regime to claim that the hated United States is fomenting their movement. But Khamenei is viciously anti-American, and he will blame the protests on the U.S. no matter what.

Indeed, he already has. On Twitter, Khamenei accused “enemies of Iran” — a thinly veiled reference to the U.S. — of using “the various means they possess” to “infiltrate and strike the Iranian nation,” despite the fact that these protests are local in origin. Opposition to the United States is a first principle of the Iranian regime, and it uses it to justify their grip on power.

To be sure, the United States has a limited ability to influence the ultimate outcome of the protests. It is difficult to glean accurate information from within Iran, thanks in part to the regime’s long-standing practice of shielding itself from journalistic scrutiny. Many of the political reformers that were instrumental in the Green Movement have been killed, detained, or placed under house arrest, making it difficult to identify an organized faction that the U.S. could easily assist. To the extent that we can, however, we should work to tilt the scales against the regime. In this case, American foreign-policy interests are aligned with the interests of Iranian civilians: In addition to being an authoritarian menace that denies its citizens human rights, Iran’s regime has been sponsoring terrorism across the Middle East and killing Americans for decades. If the regime is swept away, Iran has a chance to be a normal country that tends to its own interests instead of exporting jihad. That would be a boon for U.S. and global security.

U.S. government broadcasting is a powerful tool that can be used to promote freedom and bolster anti-regime protestors in Iran. After all, that’s why Congress has appropriated some $740 million per year to finance it. Promoting freedom and waging an information war on America’s enemies is in our national interest.

But led by a stable of Obama appointees, the Voice of America and the Persian language service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Radio Farda) are being used to support the Iranian regime and denigrate the leadership of President Trump.

While the Persian language services, after much public criticism, are now posting cellphone videos of the protests on their social media accounts, their on-air coverage has been tepid, with regular hosts “balancing” coverage of the protestors with coverage of the regime’s lies.

The VOA Central news bureau has been even worse. In a lead on-air “package” on the fourth day of protests, it regurgitated Iranian state media and statements from Iranian regime leaders, putting President Trump’s tweet of support for protestors in the 16th graph.

This was not an isolated example. The next day, VOA central news again parroted the Iranian government line and slammed President Trump:

Rouhani Rejects Trump’s Support for Iranian Protesters

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says U.S. President Donald Trump has no right to express sympathy for the Iranian people after referring to them as terrorists. Trump has praised protesters in Iran for rallying against the government’s economic policy…

As noted by former VOA broadcaster Ted Lipien, who runs the independent BBGWatch, the message was devastating: “Voice of America to Iranians: Government wants you to behave.”

We are in the midst of an anti-regime uprising all across Iran, and U.S. government broadcasting is essentially supporting the dictators, not the people. It’s an absolute disgrace.

VOA Director Amanda Bennett, who is married to the former owner of the Washington Post, clearly lives in a bubble, filled with the voices of Ben Rhodes, John Kerry, and Susan Rice, who have urged the Trump administration to keep quiet, just as Obama did the last time the Iranian people took to the streets en masse.

In a self-congratulatory Facebook post, Ms. Bennett (aka Mrs. Don Graham) said that VOA had launched a “live blog (on New Year’s Eve!) and filled it with original reporting from Iran… Considering that this all happened on a major holiday when we were working with a skeleton staff, I think we’re doing pretty good.”