SOONER THAN WE THINK?

"Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims."
~ Honore de Balzac

Vladimir wants my opinion on an article about the Mohajedin-e Khalq (MEK). Basically, I think he wants to pick my brain, but since I've mentioned the subject before and since it's regionally appropriate, here goes.

The item in question is found at Global Politician and is a plea to take MEK off The List®, something which certain circles in Washington have been itching to do for a few years now. The way the plea is made is in reference to another article that had run in the Wall Street Journal back in May (the online version is subscriber only). That WSJ article was full of "important errors and oversights," according to Professor Daniel M. Zucker, the author of our current apologia pro MEK, errors and oversights which the good professor will correct for us.

Unfortunately, the professor's "clarification" begins with a little obfuscation and prevarication that goes like this:

In truth, it is not easy to get to the core of the story about the Mojahedin-e Khalq or MEK as it is generally known in western media. The reason for this difficulty is that the Iranian regime has disseminated a highly successful disinformation campaign about the MEK, a trick that the mullahs learned from studying with the Soviet Union's KGB

Bearing that in mind, we are told that MEK didn't really target and kill US military personnel and contractors back in the 1970's. This nasty rumor is nothing more than Soviet-style disinformation from the mullahs, according to the professor. Unfortunately for the professor, there was no mullah-rule back in the 1970's. Additionally, the claim that American intelligence, i.e. the CIA, didn't know anything about MEK back then is ridiculous. Is our professor a Persian, to tell such a big lie? SAVAK was the shah's spook-type goons, and who was tight with them but America's own spook-type goons in the CIA. In fact, the CIA's goons taught the shah's goons just about everything they knew and had become famous for. Who else was involved with SAVAK? Israel's own spook-type goons in the MOSSAD.

All of these spook-type goons were working together like demons to keep the shah's regime propped up, so don't come around and tell me that American intelligence didn't know about MEK.

Now, I have no love whatsoever for Iran, and I don't care if it was pre-shah, shah, post-shah, pre-mullah, mullah, post-mullah Iran, and I don't care what kind of big, fat glow-in-the-dark mess that Iran will be in the future. But what I do know is that anyone who expects me to swallow this whopper of a lie about CIA not knowing about MEK back in the day. . . well, that person is doing some serious narcotics, boyfriend.

The professor mentions the Marxist thing too. MEK started out as a Marxist organization, but either our professor doesn't understand the concept of time as expressed grammatically, or he's trying to pull a linguistic sleight of hand here. He says that MEK believes in a free-market economy and private property. He says this in the present tense. He makes no reference to the past. He does not even hint at the possibility that MEK may have changed its views on capitalism in the interim. Worse, he expects us to that there was some kind of changeling organization that came along and stole MEK's name from them while the real MEK leadership was enjoying their tea party with SAVAK.

This is the sleight of hand, the covering up of a lie, the attempt to sell a rotten bill of goods. In short, it's dishonest.

The fourth paragraph is the attempt to explain away MEK support of the student takeover of the US Embassy in Teheran. The misunderstanding here is that MEK was really trying to protect the Americans from the Islamists and then they were framed:

Indeed, the Islamist leaders of the embassy-takeover themselves have written that the MEK was not part of their group and would not have been allowed to participate because of major doctrinal differences. (See the account of the takeover by the hostage-takers' pokeswoman, Ms. Masoomeh Ebtekar.) The above points are all carefully documented in the Iran Policy Committee's White Paper # 3 of September 13, 2005, as well as the new IPC White Paper "Appeasing the Ayatollahs and Suppressing Democracy: U.S. Policy and the Iranian Opposition", released on July 27, 2006.

Let's make sure we understand what's going on here. The professor claims in paragraph two that the current regime (the one involved with the takeover of the embassy), was trained by the Soviets in disinformation. Yet the same professor, who appears to object to Soviet-style disinformation, uses the current regime's own documentation as proof of MEK's innocence. Doesn't that mean that the professor is relying on Soviet-style disinformation to make his case?

The paragraph on MEK's popularity is interesting for it's lack of sources. It's also interesting for another reason:

How is it possible for the MEK to uncover details of the regime's nuclear and missile programs if the people don't trust and respect the MEK? For that matter, how does the MEK manage to have the written support of 11,000 Iraqi jurists and 5.2 million Iraqi individuals including, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, if the MEK was an agent of repression under Saddam Hussein?

How is it possible for MEK to have details of the mullah's nuclear program? Simple. Soviet-style disinformation. They are merely the messengers of the lies the mullah regime wants the West to know. They are handed the lies and then they hand them over, kind of like Ahmed Chalabi did.

Ask yourself why old Chalabi got himself into big trouble with the US, to the point of having his house raided by US troops two years ago. There was never any explanation for Chalabi's spectacular fall from grace, was there? At least the Defense Intelligence Agency (DOD's equivalent of CIA), finally cut off the funds. But Chalabi was Iran's boy in Iraq from Day 1. Why should we believe that MEK is any different and why should we believe the professor's unsourced claims in support of it?

It's pretty clever of the professor to leave out the part about MEK helping Saddam to crush the 1991 serhildan. There's some mention of that at The Agonist. The Agonist post also notes a connection to Chalabi:

Another speaker at the event, Neil Livingstone, is often interviewed by the press as a terrorism expert. He has been quoted as saying he has had good relations with the MEK for 30 years and also advised Ahmed Chalabi's INC. Livingstone urged the government to step up its efforts to destabilize the Iranian government, saying "we must recognize the Iranian government in exile." This refers to Rajavi, who was declared by her movement to be President-in-exile. "We are all members of the Iranian Resistance," he closed.

There's a mention of one Captain Vivian Gambara at The Agonist, too. She was a US Army negotiator at with the MEK at Camp Ashraf. Interestingly enough, she's involved with our professor at Americans for Democracy in the Middle-East (Note: the TLD for that site is "ws").

The rest of the professor's article is nonsense. Who cares that MEK didn't take up arms against the mullahs until 1981 or that some US government flunky had to take 4,000 DNA samples at Camp Ashraf? These things are irrelevent. Why should anyone believe MEK, or its Western supporters, about anything, especially when we have the Chalabi example, and Chalabi's own ad man deep in MEK's muck for thirty years?

The thing that really strikes me about all the articles like this one, is how chickenshit they are and how chickenshit the people behind these schemes are. Instead of coming out and saying that Iran is an evil regime that needs to be destroyed, and confronting them head-on about it, they engage in proxy wars to do their dirty work.

This is what we see in Lebanon right now. Hezbollah is the proxy doing Iran's dirty work and Israel is the proxy doing the West's dirty work. Everyone else is caught in the middle. Iran began this proxy war to distract attention from scrutiny over it's nuclear program by the limp, impotent, totally worthless UN--another one of Iran's enablers. Given that all Persians are inveterate liars, the big question is this: How close is the evil Teheran regime to owning it's first homemade-from-scratch nuclear warheads?

I have the suspicion it's a lot closer than the "experts" are misleading us to believe.

In the meantime, Kurds continue the fight against the evil regime on their own, with one Kurd in a pasdaran unit killing some of his pasdaran comrades during a battle against the Kurdish HPG, and then defecting to HPG, as reported by DozaMe. I hope this is a sign of things to come as the clashes continue between Kurdish freedom fighters and the forces of the Teheran.