In Bed with Terrorists

A battle is brewing within the ranks of neoconservatives in Washington. Public flashes of private quarrels are uncommon among this rarefied circle of uber-hawks, who have been unanimous in shaping and supporting the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy. Yet they find themselves at odds over the most unlikely of issues: an Iranian terrorist group.

The neoconservatives have been unanimous in their skepticism that recent European-led negotiations to curtail Iran's nuclear program will hold. But here, unanimity breaks down. One faction of neoconservative Iran hawks believes that the Bush administration should pursue a more traditional set of diplomatic, economic and mi litary carrots and sticks to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear aspirations. But another faction argues that the only real long-term solution is to change the Iran regime itself. "Even if you believe that a nuclear Iran is inevitable," Michael Ledeen, one of the leading Iran regime change advocates, recently wrote in National Review, "is it not infinitely better to have those atomic bombs in the hands of pro-Western Iranians, chosen by their own people, than in the grip of fanatical theocratic tyrants?"

And even as they urge the Bush administration to adopt regime change in Iran as its official policy, the hawks disagree on which Iranian opposition groups Washington should work with to depose Iran's current fundamentalist regime.

Until recently, some neoconservatives looked to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former U.S. ally, the Shah of Iran, who was deposed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Pahlavi, currently living in a Washington, D.C. suburb, is a potential Ahmad Chalabi-type figure around which the Iranian opposition could unite (at least for Washington's purposes). But those plans now seem unlikely for a variety of reasons, including Pahlavi's own reluctance to assume the political mantle.

As they look around for replacements, one camp is pushing the U.S. to provide financial assistance, communications equipment and counsel to Iranian students and other dissident groups to help engineer a nonviolent revolution, similar to the ones the world has witnessed in Serbia in 2000, last year in Tbilisi, Georgia, and, just this past month, in Ukraine.

Other hawks – led by conservative think tanks such as the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy – dismiss such a plan as unrealistic. They argue that the U.S. should work with the sole Iranian opposition group that has experience fighting the Tehran regime: the People's Mujahedeen (Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK). According to them, the group possesses two irreplaceable assets: an established network of supporters inside Iran that can provide intelligence on Iran's nuclear program; a long history of fighting the Tehran regime.

Ledeen's camp, however, has been vocal in opposing the idea of using the MEK, which received significant military support from Saddam Hussein. And there's just one other problem: in 1997, the State Department put the MEK, and its political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), on the official U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Terrorists We Tolerate

Founded as an Iranian leftist group in the 1960s with Marxist and Islamist leanings, the MEK participated in the 1979 revolution to overthrow the U.S.-backed Shah. But in 1981, the MEK broke with Iran's post-revolutionary leaders and decamped first to France (where it still has a large following), and then in 1986, to Iraq, where the group fought with Saddam Hussein against fellow Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. They also served as shock troops to put down the rebelling Iraqi Shias in the wake of the first Gulf War. The MEK was also responsible for numerous attacks on Iranian embassies and assassination of Iranian officials carried out by the group in Europe and Iran in the 1990s.