iran panorama

  By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh Iranian leaders across the political spectrum, including the hard-liners, “moderates” and “reformists,” have been vocal and in agreement on one particular issue: They want sanctions relief from the US. Even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was very reserved about expressing his opinion publicly when the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal was first reached, has been impatient about having sanctions lifted. In remarks broadcast by state television this month, he said: “We have to be careful (that the dialogue is not conducted) in a way that parties drag (out) the negotiations, as that is harmful for the country.” He had previously said: “Recently, we set a condition and no one will go back on it: The condition is that if they want Iran to return to its JCPOA commitments — some of which have been canceled — the US has to lift all sanctions.” It is understandable why the paramount leader of Iran has been very impatient for the sanction...

 Written by Shamsi Saadati A resolution was recently introduced to the US House of Representatives which expresses “support for the Iranian people’s desire for a democratic, secular, and nonnuclear Republic of Iran” and condemns “violations of human rights and state-sponsored terrorism by the Iranian Government.” The majority of the document is devoted to cataloging some of the regime’s most recent and most severe malign activities, and it concludes with the recommendation of a multilateral Western policy that holds the regime accountable for “breaching diplomatic privileges” and safeguards the Iranian people’s rights to move for a change of regime in their homeland. H. Res. 118  makes it clear that the challenges to those rights are severe, permanent, and by no means limited to Iran’s territorial borders. The resolution emphasizes, for instance, that four Iranian operatives including a high-ranking diplomat were convicted by a Belgian court in February for plotting to set off...

 Written by Shahriar Kia On Sunday, an audio recording was leaked across Iranian state media which seemed to include  the regime’s  Foreign Minister  Mohammad  Javad  Zarif making rare critical statements against  Qassem  Soleimani, the head of the  Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’  terrorist  Quds Force , who was killed in a US drone strike in January 2020.    A fter Soleimani’s death, the regime responded with an outpouring of propaganda to portray the notorious terrorist as a figure who was broadly popular both inside Iran and throughout the world. That propaganda drive saw participation from the entire “reformist” faction of Iranian politics, including Zarif and the  regime’s  President Hassan Rouhani.   Zarif remarks in the audio once again indicate that t he supposed differences between the factions  inside the regime  are merely performative, laying the groundwork for a sort of “good cop, ...

  Written by Shahriar Kia There is a resolution pending in the House of Representatives which calls for a more assertive set of policies toward the Iranian regime.  H. Res. 118  was presented to the public in a news conference on Tuesday, by which time it had acquired a bipartisan list of 225 co-sponsors. Such broad-based political agreement underscores the importance of the resolution’s observations, coming at a time of virtually unprecedented polarization in most other matters. The resolution’s sponsors and all other supporters of a stronger Iran policy are sure to view this bipartisanship as an asset when it comes to the new Iran policy. H. Res. 118 calls attention to two previous resolutions that evoked much the same purpose. One of these, H. Res. 4744 of the 115th Congress, urged the US government to formally “condemn Iranian human rights abuses against dissidents, including the massacre in 1988 and the suppression of political demonstrations in 1999, 2009, and 2017....

  By: Alejo Vidal Quadras At the latest talks in Vienna, the European signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action presented Iran with a “roadmap” of the sanctions that the US plans to suspend if Iran comes back into compliance with the nuclear deal. The proposal was furnished by the US through its European partners. The advent of  60 percent enrichment  came almost immediately after an explosion at the Natanz facility exposed the regime’s vulnerability. But that same Iranian escalation effectively confirmed that those concerns were well-grounded in the first place, since there is no practical reason for Iran to expend the money and effort involved in enriching to that level, unless the ultimate goal is nuclear weapons capability. In that sense, 60 percent enrichment is nothing if not a confession to the lies that underlay Iran’s position in the negotiations that resulted in the JCPOA. Unfortunately, many of the Western participants in those negotiations were all...

By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And now that the Biden administration has declared it is prepared to lift sanctions on the Islamic Republic in order to revive the Iran nuclear deal, aka the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), history appears to be repeating itself. The repercussions and negative consequences will probably be the same as they were after the agreement was first struck. In 2015, the Iranian regime received an extremely favorable deal from the P5+1 (the UK, France, China, Russia and the US, plus Germany). All four rounds of UN sanctions on the theocratic establishment, which took decades and a significant amount of political capital to put in place, were lifted on day one of the nuclear deal. This move by the Obama administration, which led the negotiations, was a result of failed diplomacy and was politically and strategically dangerous. This is partially becau...

 Written by Amir Taghati On April 18, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a vague statement announcing that the deputy head of the organization’s foreign special operations division, the Quds Force, had died. The statement said only that Brigadier General  Mohammad Hosseinzadeh Hejazi  had succumbed to “heart disease,” but the lack of detail quickly raised doubts about the accuracy of its claim. These doubts were soon fueled by the circulation of a message posted to Twitter by the son of another killed  IRGC  commander. “I just want to say that the cause of death was not a heart condition. My leader, this soldier of yours [was] sacrificed for you,” wrote Muhammad Mehdi Hemmat. “I offer my condolences, I also sacrifice myself for you.” Hemmat offered no further insight into the actual cause of death, but it stands to reason that if the IRGC and the Iranian regime at large are lying about it, they are doing so in order to cover up information that would b...