Strange Postings on Iran

Mullahs, Monarchists, Neocons and Zionists

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 820, 20 February 2004.

Imagine our surprise when we read under the headline "Tehran Terrorfest" in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post (26 January) that "Spartacists" would be among the participants in the "Ten Days of Dawn" celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini's return to Iran. The Post article was penned by one Amir Taheri, an Iranian monarchist and former executive editor in chief of Iran's largest daily, Kayhan, during the last decade of the despised Shah's murderous rule. As Marxist opponents of Islamic reaction, we energetically fought for the independent interests of the proletariat during the 1978-79 upheaval against the Shah, participating in struggles internationally with our signature slogans on signs, banners and newspapers (including in Farsi) proclaiming: "Down With the Shah! Don't Bow to Khomeini! No to the Veil! For Workers Revolution in Iran!" It would be very odd indeed for any "Spartacists" connected to the Spartacist League or the International Communist League (formerly international Spartacist tendency) to be guests at the Iranian clerical regime's fete.

On February 10, the Post ran another article by Amir Taheri which expanded upon his false amalgam of Marxists with Islamists. Headlined "Tehran Tyranny's 25th," the article cites as "terrorists" in league with Khomeini in 1979 in Iran: the "People's Mujahedin," the "People's Fedayeen Guerrillas, one pro-Moscow, the other pro-Beijing," and adds, "There were, as well, the Trotskyites, the Spartacists, the Guevarists and countless other leftist terrorist gangs." Taheri then notes, "Once in power he [Khomeini] began destroying his former allies one by one." Taheri's articles are the newsprint equivalent of three-card monty: shuffling names and time sequences faster than the eye can follow. In the first article (26 January), he claims "Spartacists, Trotskyites and Guevarists" are in Tehran today celebrating Khomeini's rise to power. In the next article (10 February), he says these very forces were wiped out by the ayatollahs two decades ago. To paraphrase Trotsky, even slander should make some sense.

We don't know exactly why these smears were run (and widely picked up by other print media and Web sites), but Taheri, the Post and the archreactionary think tanks and foundations that back him have plenty of reasons to hate us for our ideas. We are energetic defenders of the Palestinian people against the genocidal policies of the Zionists; we proudly took a side in defense of Iraq against the one-sided slaughter waged by U.S. imperialism; we unconditionally defend the North Korean deformed workers state's right to possess nuclear weapons to defend itself; we are champions of the rights of black people, immigrants and workers against the capitalist rulers. What stands behind Taheri and his slander machine are the architects of U.S. imperialist mass murder, braintrusters for Zionist terror against the Palestinian people and racist, anti-labor media magnates like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black.

Taheri's association of "Spartacists" with the Iranian ayatollahs is so demonstrably false that he is convicted by his own pen as a liar whose word on anything is not to be believed. In addition to our publicly documented 25-year history of opposition to Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, we rallied to the defense of our political opponents on the left who were tortured, jailed and killed by the mullahs they foolishly tailed against the Shah back in 1979. In 1989, we launched an international united-front campaign of protest against the massive wave of killings of leftist political prisoners and other dissidents in Khomeini's prisons.

We are proud to be the only political tendency on the planet which hailed the 1979 Soviet Red Army intervention in Afghanistan in the war against CIA-backed Islamic cutthroats. We condemned Gorbachev's withdrawal of the troops, which signaled the rollback culminating in the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself. We raised over $40,000 in a 1989 worldwide campaign of humanitarian aid for the civilian victims of the CIA's mujahedin reactionaries in the Afghan city of Jalalabad.

Taheri is not merely a tool of the ousted monarchists, the displaced plumes of the peacock throne, which the neocons in and around the Bush administration seek to reinstall by crowning the son of the last hated monarch Iran's next ruler. No, Amir Taheri is himself a veritable Weapon of Mass Regurgitation (WMR). Numerous articles under his name have appeared in slightly varied form in newspapers around the world, including the Jerusalem Post, the Canadian National Post, the National Review, the New York Times, major bourgeois weeklies and dailies in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, as well as Arab News, mouthpiece for the reactionary Saudi regime, and Gulf News, published out of the United Arab Emirates. The virulently racist right-wing McCarthyite David Horowitz propagates Taheri's columns on college campuses. Zionist Web sites pick up Taheri's columns as part of their worldwide crusade to bash opponents of Israeli state terror as "anti-Semites."

Bad things tend to happen to people who are called "terrorist," especially in Bush's America where many fundamental democratic rights have been abrogated by the so-called "war on terror." In pursuit of our own democratic rights, we have defended the rights of the entire left and workers movement by energetically fighting such deadly slanders. We've fought violence-baiting and "terrorist" smears from publications, including the New York Post before, as well as more formidable forces than that Murdoch rag. The Spartacist League sued the FBI over its false targeting of us as "terrorist"—and won. In 1984, the FBI was forced to recast its definition of the SL to exactly what we are: a Marxist political organization. This was a modest but important victory against the new McCarthyism of the Reagan years. We also noted at the time that we have "no illusions that the government's secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government" ("FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists," WV No. 368, 7 December 1984). Consistent with our purpose to defend the workers movement from capitalist repression, it is necessary to expose Amir Taheri and the dangerous forces behind him.

Not Merely a Pundit but a Provocateur

Amir Taheri is not only a prolific writer; he is also a scribe for the cabal of neocons represented by a "public relations" firm called Benador Associates, whose client list is a veritable "who's who" of the architects and apologists for the terror and destruction for which U.S. imperialism is infamous worldwide. The neocons' mission is to get the Bush administration to bring "democracy" to Iran and redraw the map of the Near East in the interests of U.S. imperialism and "Israeli security." Notably, a Pacific News Service report (19 June 2003) states that Taheri is now a paid employee of the U.S. government, a director of a new satellite television channel which broadcasts Farsi-language U.S. propaganda into Iran.

Like the late Shah, for whom he apologizes with mild criticisms, Taheri views Marxists as criminals. "Fanatical Journalism," an 18 July 2003 article on the Payvand Web site, which specializes in news about Iran, states:

"At the height of his power, the late Shah of Iran dismissed the assertion that his regime held any political prisoners, retorting that the people whom the interviewer were referring to ‘happened to be Marxist,' an outlawed political ideology. He was basically trying to say that being a Marxist was tantamount to being a criminal. This mentality permeated the psyche of his loyal subjects as well, including Mr. Taheri.... It is unfortunate that a ‘journalist' should find it necessary to falsify and vilify in order to score political points. We know from experience that ideologues of this kind, when in power, would no longer need the service of words."

When in power, the Shah "spoke" through the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was installed by the CIA in 1953 in a coup against the bourgeois-nationalist Mossadeq government which planned to nationalize Iran's oil industry. To prop up the Shah's rule, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officers helped found the "intelligence" agency SAVAK to round up members of the outlawed Communist party (Tudeh) and "neutralize" all opponents of the regime. All facets of life were monitored, censored and repressed, from journalists' articles, to classroom discussions, labor and peasant organizations and even Iranians living abroad. SAVAK ran a network of informers which monitored some 30,000 Iranian students on U.S. college campuses alone (Intelligence Resource Program Web site, 13 January 2000). In the late 1970s, Iranian students protested the U.S.-backed Shah in massive demonstrations, wearing masks to protect themselves and their families back home from SAVAK reprisals.

Today, the rule of the mullahs that toppled the Shah in 1979 itself teeters toward the brink of collapse. Iran's young population doesn't want to live in a theocratic state; women chafe under the veil; students protest the all-sided repression. The historically militant workers movement engages in strikes, with wide popular support, demanding pay which has sometimes been withheld for years. The so-called "reformers" recently staged a mass walkout from parliament in protest of the banning by religious hardliners of the Guardian Council of more than 2,400 candidates from the February 20 elections. A massive boycott of the polls is anticipated. It is in this context of a regime on the rocks, the Islamic reformist movement discredited, and restive youth and workers looking for answers, that Taheri attempts to discredit the Marxists by smearing them as supporters of the mullahs.

No mere reporter, Taheri took his provocations to the streets at an antiwar demonstration in London last year. He went as part of an organized group of pro-war counter-demonstrators. In Taheri's own words (Jerusalem Post, 21 February 2003): "The Iraqis had come with placards reading ‘Freedom for Iraq' and ‘American rule, a hundred thousand times better than Takriti tyranny!'" Then, using the oldest trick in the book, this claque wedged its way forward to the podium using a small, elderly Iraqi grandmother as its prow and demanded that Reverend Jesse Jackson give them the microphone. With more than a trace of racism, Taheri concludes his account stating, "The reverend's gorillas closed in to protect his holiness."

To what purpose do the neocons rant? For "regime change" in Iran. On the one hand, there is Taheri, whose main purpose is to promote the monarchists, not direct American intervention, as the "democratic" force to overthrow the mullahs. In an article headlined "Iran Is No Iraq and the US Should Leave It Well Alone," Taheri writes—with a whiff of the chauvinism for which the Persian ruling class is infamous—that "Iraq was a mere torture chamber for a brutal dictator," whereas "the Iranian nation-state" is "one of the oldest in the world" (London Times, 18 June 2003).

On the other hand, there is Michael Ledeen, a Zionist neocon who was a major figure behind the Iran-Contragate scandal (where Reagan administration officials and operatives sold weapons to Iran to finance the counterrevolutionary contras in Nicaragua). In his own demented words: "The official news service reported that Bush had threatened Iran with the same treatment he had delivered to Iraq. I can hear the Iranians sighing, ‘oh, if only it is true.'... We must liberate Iran in order to win the terror war in Iraq." "Total war" and "creative destruction" are other Ledeen visions: "Creative destruction is our middle name.... A total war strategy does not have to include the intentional targeting of civilians, but the sparing of civilian lives cannot be its first priority" (cited in London Guardian, 24 February 2003). Ledeen and his ilk are so far out that they denounce the U.S. State Department and Colin Powell personally as "appeasers."

Eleana Benador: Stage Manager of Many Dr. Strangeloves

Benador Associates is fronted by Eleana Benador, a Peruvian-born media manipulator who got her start in the neocon world as an adviser to Daniel Pipes' rabidly Zionist right-wing think tank, the Middle East Forum. (Daniel Pipes founded Campus Watch and is in the cockpit of the new McCarthyite drive to hound as "anti-Semitic" any professor, group or institution on an American campus which opposes U.S. aid to Israel or has the temerity to defend the Palestinian people.) After the September 11 attacks, Ms. Benador launched her PR business to promote the views of the neocons who shape Bush's foreign policies and those of the right-wing media barons. The London Financial Times dubs Ms. Benador a "power behind the throne." Benador's mission is to market the depraved initiative of Condoleezza Rice, who convened a meeting of the National Security Council shortly after 3,000 people were incinerated in the World Trade Center, and told them to "think about how do you capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th" (Asia Times, 30 March 2003).

To scratch the surface of the plethora of neocon pundits, professors and politicians reveals an amazing network of right-wing, union-busting, racist and pro-imperialist foundations, institutes and think tanks, directed and staffed by an interlocking cast of neocons, often related by family ties, and many of them stage-managed by Eleana Benador. In addition to Amir Taheri and the Zionist megaphone Michael Ledeen, Benador clients include blasts from the past like Cold Warrior Alexander Haig and former CIA chief James Woolsey (who is active in the inner circle of the Bush gang)—their very names evoke memories of U.S. imperialism's Murder, Inc. from Afghanistan to El Salvador.

Benador clients reach into the upper echelons and lower dungeons of today's White House and Pentagon as well. Richard Perle (known as the "Prince of Darkness" for his conspiratorial schemes) is with the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (until recently its chairman) and a Benador client. Like most of this generation of neocons, he got his start as a protégé of the late Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a staunchly pro-Zionist politician so embedded with weapons contractors he was known as "the senator from Boeing." So, too, is Richard Perle who has been a lobbyist for and employee of Israeli weapons manufacturers. Perle is with the American Enterprise Institute, which pushes the Likud's "greater Israel" plan to redefine the Near East, yet does not want the U.S. to lose sight of "the ultimate enemy," China.

Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (the third-ranking civilian at the Pentagon and also a lawyer with a Washington firm representing Israeli munitions suppliers) co-authored a position paper in 1996 titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" for incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This paper looks remarkably like the policies the neocons advocated for the Bush administration: topple Saddam Hussein, break the Oslo accords and restore martial law in the Palestinian territories. Perle and Feith are closely linked with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz whose worldview is summed up as: "a kiloton of prevention is worth a megaton of cure" (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2003).

Conveniently located on the fifth floor of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), another neocon initiative. In addition to Perle and Feith, PNAC associates include William Kristol (editor of the neocon Weekly Standard, son of Irving Kristol, the "granddaddy" of the neocons), Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliott Abrams, Middle East Affairs director of the National Security Council. According to Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA political analysts, Abrams, "this Iran-contra criminal has already been working since mid-2001, badly miscast as the director for, of all things, democracy and human rights" on the NSC (CounterPunch, 13 December 2002). Imagine Hannibal Lecter as National Director of the school lunch program in America and you get a measure of what it means to associate Elliott Abrams with anything "human."

Plotting Armageddon is literally a family affair for Mr. Abrams. He is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, the other granddaddy of the neocons, a veteran anti-Soviet nuclear first striker from the old "Committee on the Present Danger" who is also with PNAC. Norman Podhoretz and his neocon wife Midge Decter begat John Podhoretz who writes for the Moonies' Washington Times and the New York Post. Daniel Pipes is the son of Richard Pipes, the fanatically anti-Communist Harvard historian and falsifier of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Zionists and their Anti-Semitic Christian Bedfellows

A fascinating article by Akiva Eldar titled "Perles of Wisdom for the Feithful" was published to too little notice in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz on 1 October 2002. Eldar wrote:

"A few weeks ago, Richard Perle invited the Pentagon chiefs to a meeting with researchers from a Washington think tank with particularly close relations with the Defense Department. According to information that reached a former top official in the Israeli security services, the researchers showed two slides to the Pentagon officials. The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratization of the Middle East: Iraq—a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia—a strategic goal, and Egypt—the great prize.

"The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom."

Eldar's article also reveals much more about Perle and Feith's 1996 "Clean Break" position paper for Netanyahu. Eldar writes that "the position paper, which includes sections marked like crib sheets with TEXT for Netanyahu to use in his speeches, proposes some tactical methods the Israeli prime minister can use to foresee U.S. reactions and how to manage them. They give Netanyahu tips on how to maneuver congressmen, for example." Eldar observes that Perle and Feith "are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments" and "Israeli interests."

A generation ago, when Gore Vidal noted likewise about the bigot Norman Podhoretz who spit on the Civil War against black chattel slavery, which is the central event in American history, Vidal was besieged as an "anti-Semite" by the Podhoretz crowd. Gore Vidal fired back: "Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department" (Nation, 22 March 1986). We added:

"Podhoretz has been able to maintain his loyalty to both states because of a fanatical anti-communism as holy to him as Islam to the Ayatollah. But the imperialists' strategic anti-Soviet consensus does not, much to Reagan's chagrin, liquidate differences in national interest. Despite Israel's complete reliance on American support, the Pollard affair yet again demonstrates that Israel is not simply a puppet of the U.S. The Zionist rulers know that their ‘goyishe' senior partner in Washington and the rest of the world are anti-Semites who couldn't give a rat's ass for a ‘Jewish homeland.' Has Podhoretz forgotten that the viciously anti-Semitic Nixon didn't trust Henry Kissinger, whom he called ‘Jew-boy,' to deal with Near East affairs for years?"

— "Gore Vidal: Bad Boy of the Bourgeoisie," Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 40, Summer 1987

Former neocon Michael Lind, who broke with the fold because he couldn't stomach their overture to Southern Christian fundamentalism, observes in the Nation (23 February), "As the enormity of the [Iraq] debacle became apparent, neoconservatives abruptly began avowing their own nonexistence. Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this."

He concludes his piece, "A Tragedy of Errors," noting, "There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds—only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed—well, you can hardly blame them, can you?" Indeed, Wolfowitz—who dismissed reporters' questions regarding the lack of any evidence to support his claims that Saddam Hussein had such weapons with, "It's like the judge said about pornography. I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it"—appears to be caught with a "wardrobe malfunction," i.e., pants down.

Delusions of Empire

British novelist Martin Amis argues that god as foreign policy adviser is logical for an intellectually null born-again American president. Amis "jokes" that Bush's particular vision of a far-flung American empire must seem downright homey. "We hear about the successful ‘Texanization' of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions" (cited in Asia Times, 30 March 2003).

John Foster Dulles crafted U.S. imperialist policy in the postwar years to cultivate and nurture Islam as a bulwark against Communism. In 1950 he said, "The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it" (cited in Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth [1957]).

From massive support to the Afghan mujahedin, to running guns to the ayatollahs in Iran-Contragate, to promoting religious reaction as a battering ram for capitalist counterrevolution, this has been the policy of U.S. imperialism. Then, on September 11, like Frankenstein's monster, the woman-hating religious butchers the U.S. rulers created turned on their makers with the criminal attack on the World Trade Center. This was seized upon by the Bush gang, which is now tangled in its own web of deceit, and so bogged down in Iraq that it doesn't even know where it's going.

So, like Sharon, the U.S. is "creating facts on the ground." Ariel Sharon and the neocons dream of creating an American Empire and a "greater Israel" through "regime change" across the belt extending from Turkey to China, through the heart of the Near East and Arabian Peninsula. Syria is repeatedly threatened and now squeezed between Israel and American-occupied Iraq, and Iran is a huge "domino" on their hit list.

This brings us back to Mr. Amir Taheri and the role of slander in politics. Taheri does not even believe his own lie that Marxists and Islamic fundamentalists are allies. He wrote previously, "The traditional anti-American sentiments that provide the subtext of political culture in certain sections of society in Western Europe and Latin America are mostly left leaning and thus equally hostile to radical Islam" ("Iran and Saudi Arabia, Two Zealots of Islamism," African Geopolitics No. 5, Winter 2002). Yet since at least the huge worldwide demonstrations against the U.S. war on Iraq last February, Taheri has screeched about "Marxist-Islamist terror groups."

Life is a living hell today for the Iraqi people, suffering under a U.S. military occupation which won't even restore essential public services like potable water and electric power to a country it destroyed with a display of high-tech weaponry intended to terrorize the entire planet. Taheri's spin on this monstrous crime? In an article headlined, "‘Chaos' Is Progress," he says, "Iraq is beginning to become a normal society" (New York Post, 2 February). This gives you a taste of what kind of "democracy" Taheri wants to bring to Iran. The Iranian women, the Kurds and other oppressed minorities, the left and workers movement who were butchered by the thousands under the bloody Shah, and by more thousands under Khomeini, will not welcome a U.S.-installed monarchy back with open arms any more than the Iraqi people "welcome" the terrible destruction and brutal U.S. military occupation of their country. And it is in the interests of the Iranian masses as well that we expose Amir Taheri and his neocon cabal.