Europe's Catastrophic ‘Intelligence Failure’

Shaheen Fatemi, Iran va Jahan:

This week the governments of Austria and France have received Mr. Khatami, the weakling puppet president of IRI, with pump and ceremony in Vienna and Paris. Last week, Senator Rudy Boschwitz, head of the U.S. Delegation to the 61st United Nations Commission on Human Rights, delighted millions of Iranian freedom fighters with her denunciation of the totalitarian regime in Tehran.

What a difference between the U.S. and the European attitudes towards the despotic regime of Mullahs. READ MORE

The U.S. Delegation minced no words in pointing the finger at the culprits in Tehran:

"In Iran, the regime's poor human rights record worsened last year and a resolution on the disturbing human rights situation in Iran was successfully passed at the UN General Assembly.

Authorities in Iran continued their:

1. crackdown on free speech,
2. including closing independent domestic media outlets, and
3. harassing journalists and web-log authors.
4. The February 2004 parliamentary elections, when hundreds of reform candidates were not allowed to run, made blatantly clear that regime hardliners continue to exert undue influence on the electoral and legislative processes,
5. hindering the Iranian people's ability to assert their democratic will.
6. Meanwhile, the Government continues to engage in particularly severe violations of religious freedom, and
7. Baha'is in particular are subject to discrimination, harassment, and arrest. "
   

We urge the Iranian Government to enable all candidates, including reformers, to run and campaign freely in the Presidential elections scheduled for June (2005)."

Perhaps they should have mentioned many other obvious violations of basic human rights including the 159 executions last year which assures the IRI the dubious recognition of occupying the number two position world-wide in this respect, only after Communist China!

Supposedly it is the U.S. which should be suffering from the so-called ‘intelligence failure’ because it has not had an embassy or any commercial contacts with Iran for the past twenty-five years. While in the meantime practically all European nations have maintained their full diplomatic and commercial liaison with the regime in Tehran. Therefore, it is very hard to see how the Europeans could be so much out of touch with the reality on the ground.

It takes only hours of stay in the country for any casual visitor to Iran to realize how unpopular and despised the present regime is. The degree of dissatisfaction with the government can hardly be compared with any other country in the Middle East. No one any longer is hiding his or her feelings of animosity toward this regime and its alleged ‘foreign’ supporters. It is hard to believe that all these embassies and various foreign diplomatic paraphernalia are not reporting these facts to their respective governments. Is it possible to believe that the Europeans are unaware of how precarious the continuation of regime is? Are the European governments really unaware of how unpopular they are with the rank and file of the people in Iran? Such blind spots and failures in intelligence gathering and analysis can prove catastrophic for the European countries in their future relations with a free and democratic Iran.

As one dictatorship after another is crumbling in the region and is being replaced by democratically elected governments, one wonders if the European governments are keeping score and see the handwriting on the wall. Receiving representatives of this regime, paying them official visits and trading with them is tantamount to being an accomplice in their transgressions.

If the Europeans were to close rank with the Americans in shunning this pariah regime as they did in case of the Apartheid regime in South Africa or the regime of Milosevic in Yugoslavia, there would be a much quicker end to the sufferings of over 70 million oppressed Iranians.