As Noam Chomsky has stressed, “the escalation to attack undefended civilian targets is just a classic illustration of terrorism” and “the United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism”.
Supporting a resistance, legal or illegal, against any outside threat or invasion is one thing, but backing and organizing a terrorist army for imperious purposes and political interests is a different thing. Why has the US government, which denounces other governments’ involvement with terrorism, been supporting MKO (Mojahedin Khalq Organization) and removed it from its list of the designated FTO? How the US chooses to use the group’s violent and terroristic capacity, especially when it still has a historical falling out with Washington and has won nobody’s trust because America and capitalism have historically been the organization’s primary enemies?
Possibly, it’s because MKO is regarded an enemy of the current Iranian regime and can be utilized in the most horrific and possible way of foreign intervention, that is, to wage wars against those who oppose the US. Many believe that the US is using the MKO to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program and it is quite possible, however, that the MKO is also being used to set the stage for, or even to effect, the regime change. Although at the first look it sounds so simplistic, but it is an undeniable fact that the US cannot overlook MKO as a possible political lever of pressure against Iranian regime whatever the consequences might be.
What the US policy makers have been inattentive to in their decision makings against the Iranian regime is the people themselves. Any wrong step further deepens the already wide gap between the two countries, as the imposed sanctions has so far proved ineffective to change a national perspective on the opponents and oppositions. In relation to MKO, its delisting doesn’t help the US to recreate a different image of the group within Iran; in contrast, the move has negative ramifications since MKO is long despised inside Iran. Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia asserts that: “Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States. The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War.”
Regardless of the unwritten agreements about the West’s manipulation of the group’s potentialities, MKO leaders insist to take its delisting to be a victory over the US in a legal and universal battle that proves rightness and veracity of its historical, organizational, ideological and political positions. The claim implicitly suggests that the group desists to be used by the US in any plan against Iran. However, neither the US covert support for MKO since at least 2008 nor the group’s renunciation of its role as a possible proxy have authenticated a behind the curtain plot in any form against Iranian regime.
The time is not still ripe for either to speak up of what they have up their sleeves and there is no evidence of reckoning on MKO in any options against Iran. But one thing is for certain at the moment; MKO fiercely embraces, circulates and glorifies the terrorist deeds and operations of Syrian insurgents who are disturbing the country to end Assad’s rule. If the US plans to draw a pattern seen repeated in Libya and most recently in Syria, that is to say, arm, train and support terrorist insurgents in pursuit of regime change, that is a second fatal mistake. It is so naïve to think that a group of armed terrorists deployed against Iran can possibly change a nation’s perspective even if they are wrangling over internal problems.
By N. Morgan