Military

DATE= 06/13/2002

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01138

TITLE= TERROR: THE IRANIAN CONNECTION

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Iran hosts a terrorist convention, Next, On the Line.

Host: This month marks the thirteenth anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. In Tehran, the anniversary was commemorated with an anti-Israel conference of some of the world's most notorious terrorists, among them, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. This is in stark contrast to the feelings of ordinary Iranians, many of whom expressed sympathy for Americans after the September 11th terrorist attacks. But Iran's supreme clerical ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made it a crime for Iranians to call for a dialogue with the United States. Even the reformist Iranian president Mohammed Khatami has agreed to go along with the ban. While the Iranian government embraces terrorism, the Iranian people clamor for freedom and human rights. How will that conflict be resolved? I'll ask my guests, Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Elie Krakowski, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. Welcome. Thanks for joining me today.

Danielle, who was at the terrorist convention or conference in Tehran at the beginning of June?

Pletka: Eric, I think you listed all the participants. They are the most active, senior, if you will, terrorist groups in the Middle East. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has become a lot more active in the last few years, Hezbollah, I think Hamas was probably there as well, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. I think everyone remembers Ahmad Jibril from the bombing of Pan Am 103. He was the original person who was supposed to have been involved in that -- a nice group of people.

Host: Elie, this isn't the first time that they've held this conference in Tehran, is it?

Krakowski: No, I think this is some sort of a regular, annual event in Iran since certainly in the nineties with the regime that you have there now.

Host: Why is Iran hosting a convention for terrorist groups?

Krakowski: Iran under the regime of the Ayatollahs has taken from early on a very radical approach to attempting to have some influence in the world. And supporting terrorism is a cheap way in essence because it has paid. And it has paid in essence because the United States and the West have not really reacted to it properly and have regarded it as some sort of low-level blackmail, each time looking for ways in which you can pay off the blackmailer. And I think one of the interesting reactions when [Osama] bin Laden came on the scene in a big way was, well, what do they want really? As if to say what is it that we might be able to give them so that they would leave us alone? And as we have seen with September 11th, they have an entirely different agenda that has nothing to do with actually accepting pay-offs.

Host: Danielle, does Iran's involvement with these terror groups extend beyond merely hosting them for a convention in Tehran once a year?

Pletka: Iran is intimately involved in all aspects of terrorist activity. It's not just in the Middle East and Central Asia. They used to be very heavily involved in Europe. They are still involved in Turkey. It's really a soup-to-nuts [from the beginning to the end] situation. You are looking at them funding terrorist organizations, providing weaponry to terrorist organizations, providing liaison to terrorist organizations, providing political and diplomatic cover to these people. They are full-service supporters. They are a full state sponsor of terrorism.

Host: What would be a couple of hard examples of the kind of diplomatic cover and or weapons shipments, those kinds of things?

Pletka: Let's take a good example and one that's been going on for many years. Every two to three months and sometimes more frequently, depending on the situation on the ground, an Iranian military cargo jet takes off, a seven-forty-seven usually, from Iran. It flies into Damascus, where it is off-loaded. Weapons are on it. Those weapons are trans-shipped from Damascus into the Bekaa Valley, which is controlled by Syria, in Lebanon. They are taken by Hezbollah. They are taken down to the Israeli border and they are used by Hezbollah to shell northern Israel. When the Israelis were present in the south to attack Israelis. There is everything from long-range artillery to missiles to explosives to small weaponry, and this has been going on for years. So what you have is a full military relationship between Hezbollah and Iran. In addition, you have Iranian Al Quds Brigades, that's a branch of the Iranian military, a formal branch of the military that are present on the ground that are liaison in the Bekaa Valley to Hezbollah. They have meetings regularly between the political leaders of Hezbollah and the military leaders of Hezbollah and Iranian diplomatic representatives in Beirut and Damascus. This is a complete relationship. That's only one aspect of how Iran supports terror. And of course, there's also financial support, actual cash is transferred as well.

Host: Cash transferred to?

Pletka: To Hezbollah, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and sometimes through Hezbollah to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, although that has changed. In addition, the Iranians are supporting terrorists who are operating on the ground in what are called the Israeli occupied territories on the West Bank and in Gaza. Money is going to organizations there, it's being funneled in through a variety of means. Weapons are going in again through a variety of means. The Iranians are very active in supporting these people.

Host: Elie Krakowski, at the conference in the beginning of this month, many of the statements from the Iranian officials who are involved were saying that the Palestinian Intifada should go on, that the U-S should have no role in trying to broker any kind of peace agreement, and in fact there should be no peace agreement at all. Why is it that Iran is so adamant about there not being any move toward any kind of peace in the Middle East?

Krakowski: I think it's very reflective of a regime which in essence is a very unstable one and only sees destabilization as the vehicle for increasing its influence. So it's a very destructive, it's a very negative thing. Iran used to play a somewhat more positive role before this regime in the Middle East and I think as an important statement, it still has the ability to do that if it wants to. But I think that the idea is that in the Middle East, I mean, the Iranians and the Arab states have not had very good relations. The Iranians feel that by preventing any peace, or by attempting to prevent any peace, they then maintain and increase their influence, whereas if there were peace, in other words, even if the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the others came to some sort of agreement, they'd believe that the Iranian influence would be less. I want to add to what Danielle said before. She emphasized the connection with the Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the others in Israel and around it. I think one can also say actually that the Iranians have increased the relationship and actually developed a military supply relationship with the P-L-O, with the Palestinian Authority as [with] the ship that was seized not long ago.

Host: The Karine A.

Krakowski: The Karine A. But beyond that, and I think Danielle mentioned that also, the Iranians are now again very active in Afghanistan, in subverting the process there to establish a stable regime. They are also training Uzbek terrorists in Central Asia. So the idea of trying to have a role is through that vehicle of terrorism. The attempt in Central Asia has also occurred at different levels. But I think that they believe that this kind of a threatening posture -- by the way they have also taken a threatening posture in the Caspian. So all that fits together in a sense of attempting to put pressure on others via terrorism, while incidentally continuing to develop means of mass destruction and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. So I think if that kind of situation is allowed to continue for much longer, we, I think, will face a rather serious problem there.

Host: Danielle Pletka, a couple of Iranian historians who live in the West, Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, sisters, have written recently about Iran's role in the origin of Islamist terrorist activity. And one of the things they said was that the founder of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini, became a major figure in Islamist terrorism because he was the first truly eminent religious figure to lend it his authority. As an established clerical scholar, Khomeini gave modern Islamist totalitarianism a religious respectability that it had sorely lacked. What kind of role does the clerical regime in Iran have in justifying terrorism as somehow consistent with Islam?

Pletka: It's an interesting question, I think the first step back that you need to take is to recognize that Iran is a Shiite regime and that most of the population of the Middle East is Sunni. So the pronouncements of Shiite clerics would not necessarily be considered dispositive on whether, for example, suicide bombing is a legitimate act. But in fact, interestingly, they've taken a real leadership role on this. And suddenly clerics in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt and really throughout the Middle East have followed in their footsteps in this. It's not a subtle shift, but it has been a slow shift to legitimize the idea that suicide is an acceptable form of Jihad, of warfare, and that the murder of civilians is acceptable. In fact, there's quite an ongoing debate inside the rest of the world about the role that these clerics play. In terms of Iran, this is the government. The clerics are indistinguishable from the government. This is a theocracy and because of that, such pronouncements mean that those are the laws of the land. If you say that Jihad, that suicide, that suicide bombings, that terrorism is an acceptable act for a pious Muslim, then what you are telling your people and the people that you support is that this is something that we support as a matter of foreign policy. That's extraordinarily important.

Host: Elie Krakowski?

Krakowski: Yes, I think one of the things one needs to keep in mind is one, the distinction between Shiite Islam and Sunni Islam, but I think the other element is that the development of Islam in terms of interpretation and all that, certainly in the Sunni world, was very limited from several centuries back. And there are no real specific definitive statements or rules on the specifics. So what happens is that the clerics who, as Danielle pointed out, have now clear political rule are the authorities and so forth, made pronouncements and by virtue of the fact that they are the authority, the legislative, executive, and so forth make pronouncements, the pronouncements become law. There has now begun to some extent a certain debate among Islamic scholars about this whole thing of suicide bombing. Of course some of them call them martyrs and you have some authorities who have stated that there's nothing in Islam that actually sanctions killing oneself. Unfortunately that has remained not a very strongly put forward view and the dominant one has been the views of the radicals who also hold the reins of power.

Host: Danielle, there seems to be growing dissatisfaction from the Iranian public with the rule of the clerics and their radical interpretation of what an Islamic state would be. In fact, so much so that recently Ayatollah Ebrahim Amini [Najafabad], who's the deputy head of the assembly of experts in Iran, in May, he warned that Iran is on the verge of a social explosion, he said, "If popular discontent increases as is the case, society and the regime will be threatened. No regime," he warned, "can maintain itself in power by force." Is there a growing recognition by the clerics in Iran that their oppressive rule in that country is threatened by popular dissatisfaction?

Pletka: I think that there are wings of the government that do recognize that there's a problem and those are what people like to call the reformists. It's not a term that I favor because I think reform within the concept of theocracy is a very limited kind of reform and that if there's going to be real reform inside Iran, we need to broaden that outside of the Khomeinis, Khamene'is and Khatamis and bring in some people who don't actually believe that Sharia is the law of the land and that everything must come from the Koran. So that's part one. But within that narrower construct of the government that exists inside Iran, certainly there are people who recognize, and I think Khatami is one of them, that if you repress people, if you give them absolutely no economic opportunity, no political opportunity, no educational opportunity, if people really don't have, if they don't have lives to live -- and that is increasingly the case inside of Iran -- then there is going to be a lot of popular discontent and that that discontent is going to erupt in the way that it did in 1979, in the way that it did in Eastern Europe. There have been significant demonstrations inside Iran in the previous months. People have tried to pass them off as excited soccer celebrations but that's just not true. People were holding up placards denouncing the government. There's a real problem inside that country. And obviously from our point of view there should be some radical change. From the point of view inside the regime there are people who understand that there needs to be at least a safety valve. Unfortunately others don't quite see that.

Host: Elie, Danielle mentions the various protests and marches in the streets. And one of the significant points that has happened with just about every one of these protests in the street is that a group called Ansar-e-Hezbollah, the "helpers of the party of God," have taken to the street with clubs and iron bars and attacked the protesters. And this is a group that has also been reported to be very active in trying to find suicide bombers. It recently had a Web site up that was recruiting suicide bombers worldwide. Is there a connection between the internal forces of repression within Iran and the culture of terror that the regime embraces in its foreign policy?

Krakowski: Well, first it's rather interesting, of course, that when they recruit suicide bombers, they don't recruit some of the more prominent members of that society. I think that also tells you something interesting about not only the utter disregard for human life that these people have but how cynical they are towards their own. And yes, there's no doubt that there's a tremendous connection between internal and external repression. Because when people begin to use these kinds of tools of assassination, killing indiscriminantly for the purpose of terrorizing people, then there are really few distinctions between internal and external. That is to say, the tool is useful whether you want to maintain yourself in power within or whether you want to explain your power without. To say again, to touch back on the earlier question that you had mentioned, I think Iran is now at a fairly critical stage in its history. When you look at the history of revolutions, there is a certain pattern that is followed, and I think Iran has now reached a stage where, in fact, as you quoted this particular Iranian leader, I think the Iranian regime is in serious danger. The reactions of people there, the so-called reformists, I don't like that term either, because they are not such reformists when it comes to certain types of issues, but there are people even within the more extreme elements of the regime that have begun to realize and recognize that. And here I would make a couple of distinctions. One is the army. I'm told from talking to a number of Iranians that the army is now a fairly important focal point for dissatisfaction among the officers that realize that what is happening is not healthy for Iran. Among the political types, you have then too. One type are more what people would call extremist elements that have begun to understand that what they've been doing is not healthy for the economy, is not healthy for the society, quite apart from any other things. And they are willing to start doing some things to move in a different direction. But then you also have the fairly typical and this is those who are now holding most of the reins of power, whether in the police or the interior ministry, [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei the supreme leader, who react to the threat by tightening up on the one thing they know how to do, which is we feel threatened, we then are going to be more hard-line, we're going to use more that tool. And that I think is what explains now increases in funding for Islamic Jihad and the others. Although part of that, I think, is because the Iranians earlier on were afraid when President Bush made these very strong and I think very wise statements, they were afraid the United States was serious. They are now beginning to think with the types of things I think that are coming mostly from the State Department, that after all the United States may not be any more serious now than it was before. And I think because of that they are now increasing their activities in the belief that the United States is not that serious in pursuing the war on terror.

Host: Do you agree with that, Danielle?

Pletka: I think the Iranians have regrouped since September 11th and since the President's Axis of Evil speech. And I agree with Dr. Krakowski entirely, [that] they were terribly concerned that we might do something. I'm not quite sure what, but something. They have regrouped. They are clearly not nervous about taking a high-profile role in Afghanistan, in the Middle East. I guess that the most important distinction that I'd like to draw in terms of the internal versus the external is the question of what really interests the United States in this regard. Although it is vitally important that we see a better life for the people of Iran, that they are allowed the kind of freedoms that we have here, the freedom of political choice, civil rights, human rights and everything else. For the United States we've had three main priorities and those are that Iran end its support for terrorism, that it stop interfering and trying to destroy the peace process in the state of Israel.

Host: I'm afraid we're out of time. I've got to wrap things up. I wish we had more time to talk about this. I'd like to thank my guests, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Elie Krakowski of the American Foreign Policy Council. For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.