The first president of Iran after its 1979 revolution, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, has added his voice to the growing chorus calling for regime change in Iran. Bani-Sadr said in an interview that “We would also like the regime to be replaced by a democratic system. However, the position of the west with regards to the current regime is not clear.” He complained that “From my perspective the west needs to be unambiguous about its wants and wishes so that the Iranian people are reassured that it is not looking for an Iranian regime dominated by foreign powers.”
This is not the first time Bani-Sadr, who long has been in exile in France, has expressed hope for the fall of Iran’s thuggish regime. Last summer he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times comparing the popular revolt against the regime to the 1979 revolution.
But Bani-Sadr’s plea for a clear and unambiguous message from the United States has fallen on deaf ears. The Obama Administration remains open to a nuclear deal with the regime. And it continues to look for other forms of “engagement.” Monday, a prominent U.S. official indicated that he is happy to work with Iran’s ruthless regime on drug-smuggling issues. U.S. envoy Glyn Davies said that he had met with Iranian diplomat Ali Asghar Soltanieh, who not only represents Iran on nuclear matters but is the current chairman of the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs. Davies said, “We are very happy to work with the chair even if he is from a country which we have differences with.”
Never mind that Iran’s surrogate in Lebanon, the Hezbollah terrorist group, has been involved in smuggling drugs into Israel and into the United States through Mexico. No wonder that Bani-Sadr has difficulty in understanding U.S. policy regarding Iran.
The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency today warned that he cannot confirm that all of Iran’s nuclear activities are for civilian purposes. IAEA chief Yukiya Amano told the IAEA Board of Governors, which is meeting in Geneva Switzerland, that “we cannot confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities because Iran has not provided the agency with the necessary co-operation.” His statement is a slightly softer indictment of Iran’s nuclear defiance than a confidential IAEA report leaked last week that indicated that the U.N. agency had “concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
Amano’s statement will add momentum to calls for stronger sanctions against Iran at the U.N. Security Council, where the United States, Britain, France and Germany are pressing Russia and China to sign off on another sanctions resolution against Iran. Although Moscow has opposed calls for new sanctions in the past, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today indicated that Russia may be willing to consider a new round of sanctions.
But persuading Moscow and Beijing to accede to effective sanctions will require strong American leadership. Unfortunately, the White House has fallen short on the sanctions issue, losing an entire year before pushing for another resolution. Moreover, the State Department has sought to indefinitely postpone gasoline sanctions passed by bipartisan landslide votes in both the House and Senate over the Obama Administration’s objections. This sends exactly the wrong signal about getting serious about penalizing Iran for its nuclear defiance.
The long-overdue push for a fourth round of U.N. Security Council sanctions has been aided by Iran’s rejection of a nuclear deal brokered by the IAEA to move most of Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium out of the country in return for fuel for a nuclear research reactor in Tehran.
The push for sanctions also has been aided by the replacement of the IAEA’s longtime Director General Mohamed Elbaradei by Amano in December. Amano has been much more forthright in detailing Iran’s continued failure to cooperate on nuclear issues, in contrast to ElBaradei who often seemed more interested in criticizing the West than carrying out his duties regarding Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons activities. After leaving the U.N. agency that he politicized to carry out his own agenda, Elbaradei now has returned to Egypt where he hopes to exploit his anti-western notoriety to launch a political career. This is a worrisome development for Egypt, but a net gain for the IAEA.
For more on Iran, see: Iran Briefing Room