Three things from this week’s pod with FDD’s Behnam Ben Taleblu:
This is the most dangerous moment for the regime since the revolution in 1979.
The Biden administration (and the rest of the world) aren’t doing enough to support the Iranian people against their oppressors.
It’s time to end the JCPOA negotiations, dismiss the lead US negotiator, and return to force all American and multilateral sanctions.
Hundreds of people have been murdered, tens of thousands arrested, women raped in the streets… the uprising against the Iranian regime sparked by the murder of Mahsa Amini is still going on. The Iranian government is a dangerous place, its power genuinely at risk for the first time. Remember, this is the regime with the nuclear weapons; the one that killed hundreds of US servicemen in Iraq; the one that supports the largest terrorist apparatus in the world; the one that until 9/11 had killed more Americans than any terrorist group. So what’s the Biden administration doing? Yeah, pretty much nothing.
Instead Team Biden has been focused on restoring the grand achievement of Vice President Biden’s last go-round, the Obama Iran deal. And his national security advisers don’t want to do anything to risk the chance — the very small chance — that the regime in Tehran might agree to come back to the deal. Now, officials in the administration allow it’s a bit unlikely Iran comes back to the deal after two years of negotiations and the rejection of enormous blandishments from Europe and the United States. But you never know.
Another excuse: Foreign policy geniuses within the White House don’t want to “discredit” Iranian demonstrators by throwing American support behind them. They don’t want people to perceive them as American puppets. Uh huh. Because we remember how all those Soviet dissidents damned Ronald Reagan for his championship of their cause…
The administration hasn’t been totally silent. Biden denounced the regime for its violence in his big UN address. And there have been a few other condemnations along the way. But when you think of what could be if the Iranian people finally dumped the regime that has bedeviled them, us and the Middle East for more than four decades…. the regime that’s sending armed drones to Russia to kill Ukrainians… doesn’t that deserve more than a press release? You’d think so.
HIGHLIGHTS
Are the demonstrations following Mahsa Amini’s killing a surprise?
Taleblu: Since 2017, there have been protests inside the Islamic Republic not tied to any particular faction, but protests triggered by distinctly non-political events, social issues, environmental issues, religious issues, and especially economic issues, and even some foreign policy issues, that allows the population to come onto the street in a geographically and demographically and class-wise, diverse way, and to say fundamentally one thing, that they want an end to the Islamic Republic.
So the Iranian people have been using every single available opportunity to them. And the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini was yet another opportunity for Iranians to make this claim, make it very publicly, show the world the massive chasm that exists between state and society inside that country
But isn’t this something new?
Taleblu: I know these days it's very vogue or very fashionable to say that these protests are qualitatively different, and there are things that do make it different. But at the same time, this touches a nerve inside the Iranian body politic, which is exactly why that brutal scene was seen exactly the same way by Iranians of different ethnicities, of different social classes, of different levels of, as you were talking about, religious virtue or religious traditionalism. And they all saw it as a massive encroachment of state power on individual liberty, on individual autonomy, something that Iranians had been protesting for over a century. [And] we are seeing not just street power, not just protests, but those protests be amplified institutionally with strikes.
So is it the end of the regime?
Taleblu: [[T]his could get us potentially to a point where there could be a critical juncture in these protests down the line, because it was the street plus strikes that tanked the Shah's regime, the previous government in Iran that fell in 1979 to an Islamic revolution.
[P]erhaps one of the most famous symbols of the Islamic Republic is this mandatory hijab, this mandatory veiling, because as long as there's been an Islamic republic, there has been protests against an Islamic republic. That's just something about street power in that country. And that's something the regime elites tend to understand very well, because they know exactly what sentiments, views, values they exploited and how they backed them up with force to stay in power for 43 years.
How have the demonstrations changed over time?
Taleblu: Protests in Iran since 2017 are qualitatively different than any ones we've seen before. And that is because the Iranian people have been less afraid than ever before to say things like, "Death to the dictator," to say things like, "Forget Syria. Think about us," to say things literally beginning in front of the Iranian parliament in 2018, "Our enemies here, they lie when they say it's in America,"
What are the keys?
Taleblu: Streets, strikes, sanctions, security forces. These are the four vectors to watch. Will the Iranian people remain on the streets? Will their activity on the streets be amplified by strikes, and will those strikes be sustained? Sanctions, will there be commensurate Western pressure at time one, two, three, so that when the Iranian people rise up from the bottom, there can be commensurate pressure from the top like a pincer movement? And once that pincer happens, when there is diminishing revenues and a continuing conflict over diminishing resources, what will the security forces do at time one, time two, time three? Will they continue to shoot at their compatriots? Will they simply not show up? Will the regime have to deploy their Shiite foreign legion on Iranian soil, like many dissidents and activists worry about constantly
So these are the four things to watch. We haven't seen those massive cracks in the security apparatus yet.
What kind of regime could come next?
Taleblu: One hopes obviously that it would be a liberal democratic system. One hopes that it's a decapitation. One hopes that you can perhaps rehab some security forces. One hopes that you might be able to have a South Africa kind of style truth and reconciliation commission. These are the highest aspirations of the Iranian activist community of the diaspora. But we also have to be quite frank and engage in these really hard-nosed conversations as to potential other models, given that there are lots of stakeholders interested in preserving what they've gained in the 43 years of an Islamic Republic that looks and acts this way.
It's high time for us to think through these very tough scenarios. What about securing fissile material? What about securing individual liberty? At what level is a guard core or Artesh commander good enough to save? Who will handle these truth and reconciliation commissions? These are lots and lots and lots of complex questions for policymakers, activists
Is the Biden administration engaged?
Taleblu: It is clear that it is not the policy of the Biden administration to change the regime in Iran. I am a little bit more of a pessimist, and I think the selective changes which are good in the discourse of the Biden administration on the Iran protest, and in particular President Biden standing with protestors during his UNGA speech, that was both morally, strategically and, I think, politically the right thing for the leader of the United States of America to do.
But my fear is that this stuff, to borrow from Tom Shelling, is more ornamental than instrumental, that if Ayatollah Khomeini gets on the phone and actually does dial in that nuclear deal that allegedly was right around the corner in August, and allegedly has been right around the corner so many times throughout 2022, that the administration may cave, and worse than that, that the Europeans who now see a stiffening of their spine on the counter-terrorism front and the human rights front, that they too may cave.
So what should the administration do?
Taleblu: Step number one, close the door on the thing that will facilitate that. Shut the lid on the JCPOA. And that can happen in my view very clearly in two ways. One, if some of the hyper pro-JCPOA voices that are charged with resurrecting that accord in the administration are no longer in the administration, so if the administration makes a firing choice.
The other would be triggering this mechanism built into the deal called snapback, which actually expires in 2025, but through the UN process allows you to shut the door on the deal. And it's something that actually was thought of quite cleverly by former Iran deal negotiators prior to 2015 and put into that deal. It basically reverse engineers the veto mechanism of the UN Security Council so only one actor is needed to close the door on the deal. But that will lapse in 2025, so step number one, do that.
Step number two is to vigorously enforce the penalties that the Biden administration inherited, particularly on oil and petrochemicals, so that if you do have this strike business be really spread throughout the energy sector, you could have the regime also facing tightening revenues over time. Because they continue to illicitly sell oil to China, and on the petrochemical front, there's more in it for them because they're not selling something price at the price of a barrel of crude oil.
Step number three is … keep the protests in the limelight. Talk about them. Mention the killed Iranians, mention the songs, mention the ideas, mention the fact that the diaspora is protesting in over 150 cities around the world. Keep this in the headlines. The Iranian people need to know that the West stands with them in their plight.
Anything else?
Taleblu: {Another step] really has to be creating some kind of a strike fund. And here is where there is actually a mirror imaging or precedent that both Trump and Biden have, because both Trump and Biden have selectively enforced oil sanctions to the degree that they use Department of Justice asset forfeiture rules to actually take Iranian oil off of these tankers when they're violating US sanctions and sell them. And now you actually do have a lot of different victims of families of terrorism trying to tie that as an asset and trying to challenge that and use that as a government owned asset in the courts to try to pay victims of families of terrorism.
The US should step this up, and step this up and use some of that money to develop what you mentioned was the corollary in Poland, which is some kind of a strike fund that could actually covertly fund through some kind of, obviously with the parallel of the '80s, legal mechanism consistent within the full scope of US law to actually give money to Iranian trade unions, to actually give money to families that have lost breadwinners, not just in this protest, but in those different iterations of anti-regime protests we've seen since 2017.
What about what Elon Musk was talking about… Starlink?
Taleblu: The Starlink website [a way to bypass regime internet controls] is down in Iran and already there are all these hacker and ransomware groups trying to take advantage of the fact that there are Iranians looking for Starlink online and actually using this to reportedly put malware on the computers and mobile devices of potential activists or potential protestors or potential strikers. So we're in this position where we're potentially talking about the provision of this service without providing it. And I think that's really one of the more dangerous positions both for the private sector who may want to help, as well as for the US government to be in.
So who’s winning?
Taleblu: So I can't put a number on it, but on balance, the good guys are winning, but how do we put time on their side is a bigger question.
See the rest of the transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Iran’s Uprising Gains Steam (Foreign Policy, October 17, 2022)
"No going back": Gen Z at the forefront of protests in Iran (Axios, October 17, 2022)
Four decades of smoldering discontent among Iranian women is erupting (Washington Post, September 26, 2022)
The Beginning of the End of the Islamic Republic (Foreign Affairs, October 18, 2022)
Iran's Khamenei calls anti-government protests "scattered riots" designed by the enemy (Reuters, October 12, 2022)
At the center of Iran’s uprising, Kurds now face a mounting crackdown (Washington Post, October 18, 2022)
Iranian rock climber who competed without hijab returns home (AP News, October 19, 2022)
CNN Exclusive: After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran (CNN, October 21, 2022)
Iran to criminalize sale of VPNs used to skirt internet restrictions (Times of Israel, October 19, 2022)
Why Elon Musk’s Starlink will not affect protests in Iran (Aljazeera, September 26, 2022)
Russian errors prompted the deployment of Iranian drone personnel to Ukraine, a U.S. official says (New York Times, October 20, 2022)
Iranian Shahed-136 Drones Increase Russian Strike Capacity and Lethality in Ukraine (FDD, October 18, 2022)
EU to add new Iran sanctions over drone supplies to Russia (Reuters, October 19, 2022)
The Beginning of the End of the Islamic Republic (Foreign Affairs, October 18, 2022)
Will Biden allow Iran to hijack Syria aid? (Washington Examiner, October 19, 2022)
Notable & Quotable: Iran (WSJ, September 25, 2022)