My friend Jack Wheeler — the architect of the Reagan Doctrine — gave this speech on Friday at our Council for National Policy meeting. CNP has been described by the NEA leadership and by the New York Times as the coordinating body of the entire conservative movement, and its role in enabling and implementing Reagan’s policies in the last decade of the Cold War was immense. Jack’s comments now, as then, could well change the course of the world. They certainly should.

With the Soviet Union, there was simply no way, despite the fantasies of State Department invertebrates, for a negotiated peace. The only way to win the Cold War was to get rid of the Soviet Union – in a word, regime change. And the only way to do this peacefully, without a war, was to get the Soviet Union to collapse from within, to implode upon itself.

So it was with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, so it is today with Iran. But the opportunity to implode Iran, to cause it to collapse from within without a war, without risking the lives of American soldiers in a military attack – this opportunity is being handed to us on a golden platter.

The article is posted below.

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Imploding Iran

by Dr. Jack Wheeler
October 12, 2006

How many of you here have been members of CNP since the 1980s and remember the critical role the CNP played in generating support for anti-Soviet freedom fighters?  Please raise your hand.

Keep them up, thanks – now, the rest of you notice who these folks are.  Remember them, and after this panel, go up to them and ask them what it was like 20 years ago when the thought of collapsing the Soviet Union seemed completely off the wall.

Yet it was the incessant, unrelenting, demand of thousands, millions, of conservatives who belonged to organizations led by members of the Council for National Policy, that enabled the Reagan Administration to support and supply with money, training, and equipment, anti-Soviet freedom fighters.  And that turned out to be the key to winning the Cold War.

I want to talk to you today about how you, as current members of CNP, can play the same role in winning the war on Islamofascist terrorism by ridding the world of its principal sponsor, the Mullahcracy ruling Iran.

With the Soviet Union, there was simply no way, despite the fantasies of State Department invertebrates, for a negotiated peace.  The only way to win the Cold War was to get rid of the Soviet Union – in a word, regime change.  And the only way to do this peacefully, without a war, was to get the Soviet Union to collapse from within, to implode upon itself.

So it was with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, so it is today with Iran.  The opportunity to implode Iran, to cause it to collapse from within without a war, without risking the lives of American soldiers in a military attack – this opportunity is being handed to us on a golden platter.

To understand why, we must understand the political and social structure of Iran – for that structure has fault lines that can be made to fracture, just like the Soviet Union.

I’m going to have to ask you to see this structure in your mind’s eye, as I don’t have a map of Iran to project up on a screen.  I’ll simplify it to make it easier to imagine.

The center of Iran is occupied by Persians.  They are by far the largest ethnic group but do not form a majority.  They make up less than 50% of Iran’s 70 million people.  Over 65% of Persians are under 25 years old.  They have no memory of the Shah and have known nothing but the religious tyranny of the mullahs all their lives.

Vast millions of Persian youth, especially in the big cities like Tehran, seethe with hatred for the regime and – get ready for this – are pro-American.  They long for America to liberate them from the mullahs.

This was typified by a conversation I had one week ago with a young Persian man who was risking his life to support his family by smuggling clothes, children’s toys, and cases of soft drinks in a speedboat across the Strait of Hormuz.

He was from Iran’s main port of Bandar Abbas.  “Everybody there hates these mullahs who have ruined our country and our lives,” he told me.  “The government in Tehran is a Taliban government like in Afghanistan.  Please tell America that America must come and get rid of our Taliban in Tehran like it got rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan!”

The Strait of Hormuz is the world economy’s most important waterway, through which passes much of the world’s crude oil.  At the entrance to the Persian Gulf, a point of the Arabian Peninsula sticks up and seems to almost poke Iran in the belly.  This point of land, known as Musandam, is part of the country of Oman.

Every night, my Persian friend and scores of his colleagues, pack up their speedboats and race across the 30 miles from Musandam to the coast of Iran – 100 to 200 speedboats or more a night.

The Iranian Navy cannot control it – and is so corrupt that when my smuggling friends are caught, they simply bribe the navy officers who let them go.

This not only shows how bad things are for the regime, it shows how easy it would be for the CIA, or the more competent DIA, to smuggle in supplies to Persian resistance and democracy movements begging us for such support.

That’s at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.  At the head of the Persian Gulf, across from southern Iraq, is a region of Iran called Khuzistan, known to those who live there as Ahwaz.

The folks in Ahwaz are not Persian – they are Arabs, Shia Arabs like across the border in southern Iraq.  The Ahwazi Arabs are so full of hatred for the Tehran Mullacracy they have formed a resistance movement, the National Liberation Movement of Ahwaz or NLMA.

Among their activities is sabotaging the oil installations and pipelines – for 90% of Iran’s oil comes from Ahwaz.  The Ahwazis get none of the oil money – they are among the poorest people in Iran.

In the past twelve months, 25,000 Ahwazis have been arrested, 131 executed, hundreds have disappeared.  250,000 have been thrown out of their villages and their land seized, with hundreds of thousands more scheduled for the same fate as the regime creates a military security zone.

The mullahs have declared war on the Ahwazis, of whom there are over 4 million or almost 6% of Iran’s population, and the Ahwazis are fighting back.  Since access to Ahwaz is only a short ferry ride from Kuwait, it would be easy for the US to support them.

I encourage you to look at the NLMA’s website, www.al-ahwaz.com.  One of the most interesting announcements is about NLMA’s alliance with the Iranian Kurds.

The Kurds are older than history.  The earliest writing, Sumerian clay tablets over 5,000 years old, mention the Land of Kurda in the mountains of northern Mesopotamia.  That’s the Kurdish homeland to this day.

There are around 40 million Kurds, making them by far the world’s largest ethnic group without their own country.  That’s because there are 5 million of them in Iraq, 10 million in Iran, 4 million in Syria, over 20 million more in Turkey, and independence for them requires breaking these countries apart – or so these countries fear.

You have all heard of Iraqi Kurdistan, the one region of Iraq where there is no civil war, no terrorism, no American soldiers patrolling the streets or dying from improvised bombs.  In their place is a construction boom of new homes and office buildings.

Rather than causing Iraq to break apart, Iraqi Kurdistan is holding Iraq together.  The peace and freedom Iraqi Kurds enjoy today are what the Kurds of Iran want for themselves.  There are twice as many Kurds in Iran as there are in Iraq, some 10 million or 14% of Iran’s population.

In August 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared a Holy Jihad against the Kurds for opposing his theocratic rule, and the Mullacracy has been killing and oppressing them ever since.

A number of Kurdish resistance movements have arisen in Iran, the largest being the Kurdistan Democracy Party of Iran (KDPI), the Komala Party, and the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan (RUK).  All have bases and sanctuaries in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Kurdish guerrilla soldiers call themselves Peshmerga, those who face death.  Two weeks ago a group of RUK Peshmerga took me clandestinely across the border into Iran.  I tell the story of my experience on my website, ToThePoint.  These Kurdish freedom fighters are risking their lives attempting to liberate their country.

Yet when the leader of the RUK, Hussein Yazdanpanah, was approached by the CIA, he was asked only what the Kurds in Iran could do for it, never once talking about how the CIA could help the Kurds.

So far we’ve discussed the Persians, the Ahwazi Arabs, and the Kurds.  The northwest corner of Iran is inhabited by yet another ethnic group, the Azeris.  As the Ahwazis are Shia Arabs, so the Azeris are Shia Turks, and are the same ethnic folks who have their own country bordering Iran on the north, the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

There are three times as many Azeris in Iran as there are in Azerbaijan:  24 million vs. 8 million.  This means over one-third of the population of Iran is Azeri.  Last May 23, a Persian newspaper in Tehran published a cartoon depicting Azeris as cockroaches.  For the next two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Azeris demonstrated in cities across Iranian Azerbaijan such as Tabriz, demanding an end to the “Islamic Republic” government in Tehran.

Mullacracy leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – more appropriately known as Ahmadi Nutjob or the Persian Midget – responded with massive arrests and brutal suppression with gangs of thugs known as Basiji.

The bottom line is that Iran right now is a boiling seething cauldron of hate for the Mullacracy, that the various peoples of Iran – Persian, Ahwazi, Kurd, Azeri – are the most pro-American Moslems in the world today, and they are asking for our moral and material support so they can achieve their own liberty.

So – what can you do about it?

First, I propose that the mantra of the conservative movement regarding Iran should be these two words:  Regime Change.

That we get millions of conservatives to demand via every means of communication possible that President Bush publicly announce that the goal and purpose of his administration’s policy towards Iran is Regime Change – that negotiating is useless with Ahmadinutjob and his government, that what both the Iranian people and the world need is a democratic revolution in Iran.

If Bush made that statement, you would not believe how much celebration there would be in the streets of Iran.  So we must get every Congressman and Senator we know, every op-ed writer, every talk-show host, to publicly insist the President calls for Regime Change in Iran.

Some of you have personal access to the President and I ask that you personally urge this upon him.

Second, the way to actually achieve such regime change is called the Triple-U strategy:  Uncontrollable Urban Unrest.

The Basij thugs and Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards can put down a demonstration in Tabriz or on the campus at the University of Tehran.  But there’s a threshold of protest beyond which it can no longer be suppressed.

We can help the peoples of Iran reach that threshold in scores of Iranian cities in a host of ways – with money, communications equipment, training in organizational and protest techniques for example.

Notice I did not say weapons – guns and bullets and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.  We needed to supply the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan with them – but not to Solidarity in Poland or Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.  Lech Walensa didn’t need Stinger missiles, he needed fax machines.

Enabling and training Iranian peoples to create Uncontrollable Urban Unrest is the way to implode the Mullacracy and replace it with the democracy that the vast majority of Iranians desire.

Further, since it is the Mullacracy’s support of terrorism in Iraq that is preventing us from winning the War in Iraq, peace and victory in Iraq requires regime change in Iran.

The role the Council for National Policy played in getting rid of the Soviet Union and winning the Cold War is one of its greatest achievements.  Now is the time for CNP to play a role in getting rid of the Mullacracy of Iran, securing peace in Iraq, and winning the war on Islamofascism.

I will be happy to work together with any of you to accomplish this.

 

— Dr. Jack Wheeler is editor-in-chief of To The Point News and is widely credited as the architect of the Reagan Doctrine.