Ann Donnelly June 25: Human rights in Iran need our help

One of our region's leading Iranian-American activists sends an urgent message: U.S. help is needed to support human rights in Iran. Our own national interests are at stake. There is more that the U.S. can do than has yet been done by the Clinton, Bush or Obama administrations.

In a June 20 interview that I conducted by telephone, Hossein Khorram, a Bellevue-based, WSU-educated entrepreneur who is also president of the Iranian American Republican Council, used a striking image to describe the current repressive Iranian regime - a "vase with thousands of cracks." It may take one week or ten years, Khorram says, but eventually the crumbling regime will fall.

When it does, depending on what replaces it, the world can be a far safer place, without Iran's worldwide support of terrorism, its deadly interference in Iraq, its stoking of hatreds against Israel, or its nuclear threat. The long-standing Middle East problem would then be closer to a permanent solution.

Khorram, who on June 20 was planning a rally in downtown Bellevue, says he immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager following the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. The Iran of his youth was a tolerant, secular society. The revolution, sold to the people as bringing freedom, brought instead "one of the most fanatical regimes on the globe," according to Khorram. Ayatollah Khomeini, the despotic ultra-fundamentalist supreme leader, then urged Iranians to multiply. They did, sowing the demographic seeds of the current civil-rights uprising of a predominantly youthful society. Many thousands of Iranians are ambitious, highly educated and intensely techno-connected to the West. As the brutal crackdown against them intensifies, they face tanks, guns, axes, whips and possibly chemical weapons, armed primarily with Twitter and YouTube. Their courage demands our involvement.

Khorram explains that today's Iranian crisis has deep roots. It is no longer about the election, which he says was almost certainly rigged. Opposition presidential candidate Mousavi is a conservative now led by his followers. The roots are in the deepening despair of the Iranian people, long an advanced society even before vast oil reserves were discovered there. After 30 years of Islamic extremism and repression, poverty in Iran is now intolerable. Khorram's sources in Iran report devoutly religious mothers forced into prostitution and young people selling their kidneys to feed their families. The crisis today, he says, is about ending the fundamentalist Islamic regime, no matter what the cost.

What will replace it? The people taking to the streets this week want accountable government including a Bill of Rights. The danger is that the pro-rights movement will be infiltrated by disguised fundamentalists, Marxists, or other opportunists, thus potentially reprising the bitter post-Shah disappointment.

Khorram believes the U.S. must get involved peaceably but far more forcefully than in the past. He points out that doing so, though not without risks, is preferable to responding to a nuclear attack on Israel or on our own soil.

What can we do? We should first admit that, as experienced by Khorram who advocates his cause in Washington and has good sources in Iran, our past efforts have been misdirected. In Iran, Voice of America is nothing more than a watered-down CNN. Under Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, the U.S. State Department has been afraid to offend Iran's rulers. Largely lacking on-the-ground intelligence, it failed to understand the growing opportunity for regime change.

Khorram believes the U.S. should spearhead a grass-roots, pro-democracy campaign within Iran using cutting-edge media outlets, guided by Iranian-American experts with inside sources. Meddling? Perhaps so, but what are our alternatives? The U.S. and our Western allies cannot allow the current uprising to fail, Khorram warns, because a successful crackdown will yield an even more radicalized regime.

Khorram said he will convey our solidarity and prayers to his Iranian contacts within the uprising.
 
Ann Donnelly, a Vancouver businesswoman, is a former chair of the Clark County Republican Party. E-mail: adonnelly7@comcast.net.