Ever since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the conservatives, the Israel lobby in the United States, and allied groups have been searching for an Iranian version of Ahmad Chalabi, the notorious Iraqi figure that was allied with the neoconservatives in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, who for years fabricated lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
For at least a decade, the leading candidate has been Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi whose regime was overthrown by the 1979 Revolution. The younger Pahlavi has been trying for over 40 years to return monarchy in Iran, but as I documented elsewhere, his efforts have been dedicated to receiving the support of foreign governments to put him in power.
In the 1980s the CIA provided Reza Pahlavi with funding. He has also had long-term relations with the Israel lobby in the United States. He met with Sheldon Adelson, the man who suggested that the United States attack Iran with nuclear bombs, and has spoken at the Hudson Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Israeli-American Summit, and other pro-Israel outlets. Pahlavi has also called on Israel to help the “cause of democracy” in Iran, the same country that has been waging brutal wars in Gaza and Lebanon for a year.
The new efforts to prop up Pahlavi began immediately after Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, even before he formally took office, but the large-scale demonstrations in Iran in September-December 2022 in the aftermath of death of Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died while in custody of the security forces, provided a new opportunity for presenting the Iranian Chalabi as Iran’s “next leader.” Pahlavi’s close advisers include Amir Taheri, Amir Etemadi, and Saeed Ghasseminejad, all of whom are supporters of Israel.
Taheri, 82, a “journalist,” is Chairman of Gatestone, Europe, the right-wing Islamophobe institution, who has lied about Iran multiple times, with the goal of provoking a backlash against it. For example, In May 2006, the National Post, the right-wing Canadian newspaper, published a piece by Taheri in which he claimed that the Majles [Iranian parliament] had passed a law that “envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct color schemes to make them identifiable in public.” This was quickly refuted by many, such as Maurice Motamed who at that time was the Jewish member of the Majles. The National post retracted the piece and apologized for publishing it, but Taheri did not.
Taheri also accused Iran’s former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of being one of the students who stormed U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November of 1979, whereas at that time Zarif was a student at San Francisco State University. Right after the nuclear agreement with Iran, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was signed in July 2015, Taheri claimed that the “14-year-old Akbar Zargarzadeh hanged from a tree in Islamic boys’ camp after camp’s mullah accused him of being gay deserving death.” This too proved to be a hoax.
While Taheri is too old to be an Iranian Ahmad Chalabi, Ghasseminejad and Etemadi are relatively young and have their own ambitions for being the next Chalabi. Etemadi, 43, co-founded the small monarchist group, Farashgard [which in ancient Persian means revival] in 2018. He and Ghasseminejad both belonged to the so-called “Iranian Liberal Students Group,” a small ultra-right group of student activists in Iran, most of whom moved to Canada and the United States. Before Trump was elected in 2016, Etemadi retweeted a tweet by Mitt Romney in which he had called Trump “a phony and a fraud,” but as soon as Trump was elected, Etemadi and his monarchist ilk fell in love with his Iran policy and supported the “maximum pressure policy” of the Trump administration against Iran, which the Biden administration has, more or less, continued. A well-informed source in Washington told the author that Etemadi is on the payroll of Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), although I could not confirm the assertion independently. FDD is an Israel lobby, ardent opponent of the JCPOA, and advocate of economic sanctions and even war with Iran
Ghasseminejad is now a senior fellow at FDD. He has championed “cleansing the streets of Islamist beasts” and frets about an impending Iran-fueled “Shiite apocalypse.” But more important than this title is Ghasseminejad’s work on behalf of Iran’s “fake opposition,” a loose assortment of reactionary activists who support economic sanctions and military pressure against Iran, but whose politics stand in stark contrast to “true opposition” groups within Iran and their supporters in the diaspora, which is comprised of a broad coalition of labor and teachers’ unions, human rights groups, women’s rights and social activists, radical reformists, nationalists, secular leftists, and religious-nationalists.
Ghasseminejad was a civil engineering student at the University of Tehran, which – with the exception of the short-lived government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1951-1953 – has always been a hotbed of anti-government activities. In 2002 Ghasseminejad and Etemadi published a student newsletter called Farda [“tomorrow”] in which they espoused “liberalism,” by which they meant military adventures of the kind envisioned by neoconservative supporters of “liberal intervention” in order to spread “democracy” by force. Ghasseminejad supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and in an article entitled “Why U.S. will attack Iran,” he implicitly advocated military attacks against his native country.
In June 2003, after sporadic demonstrations against the government in Tehran, Ghasseminejad was detained briefly. In a press conference after his release, he apologized to Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised to be “a good citizen,” and stopped his political activities. Two years later, in the spring of 2005 Ghasseminejad and a small group of other students began publishing another newsletter called Talangar [roughly, “wake-up call”], which focused on criticizing leftist students and the newsletters that they were publishing.
Despite expressing his “love” for democracy and human rights, presenting himself as a “classic liberal,” and working for a foundation that “defends,” democracies Ghasseminejad has repeatedly embraced authoritarianism. In an article, entitled “What do we learn from Lenin,” published in Talangar, he expressed admiration for Vladimir Lenin and his concept of “democratic centralism.” He once referred to Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, as “the departed dear [leader] who saved Chile… and was much better than Salvador Allende,” the Chilean Socialist President who, similar to Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup in 1973.
Ghasseminejad also spoke out in favor of the slaughter of Egyptians during protests after the coup by Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013, writing in his Facebook page, “I just thought I should come to Facebook and express my appreciation for the Egyptian Army cleansing the streets of the criminal Islamic fundamentalists.” He added, “As a matter of fact, the right question is not why the Egyptian Army cleans Egypt of Islamist beasts, rather why the Iranian army allowed the Islamists to take control of our country” during the Iranian Revolution, this is while at least 3,000 people were murdered by the Shah’s army during the 1979 Revolution.
I have written about Ghasseminejad extensively. In his younger age, he was against monarchy in Iran, calling Mohammad Reza Shah “a senseless dictator,” but, like all monarchist opportunists, he, Etemadi, Taheri, and Farashgard all support Reza Pahlavi and return of monarchical dictatorship to Iran, as well as Israel. Taheri is such an ardent monarchist that at one point he wished he had licked Mohammad Reza Shah’s boots.
The most important point about these aspiring Chalabis is that they and their supporters have no significant social base of support within Iran. Reza Pahlavi has never dared to call on Iranian people to show their support for him in Iran through open demonstration, and when in December 2018 and January 2019 the monarchist Farashgard called for such demonstrations, no one showed up. Even in the diaspora, a large majority of Iranians, while opposing the clerics in Iran, despise economic sanctions, military threats, and the monarchists’ support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran. Within Iran, the hostility of Netanyahu and Iranian monarchists has transformed the generally pro-West Iranians into strong opponents of Israel.
The monarchists know that lack of a significant social based of support in Iran implies that they will never return to power through a social movement or revolution within the country. Thus, their only hope is foreign intervention in Iran, which is why they always advocate war and economic sanctions, and support Israel. Therefore, after the large-scale demonstrations in Iran in 2022, Etemadi and Ghasseminejad convinced Reza Pahlavi that he should publicize his alliance with Israel and urged him to visit there. Accompanied by two men, in June 2023 Pahlavi travelled to Israel and met with Netanyahu and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog. While there, Pahlavi met with all sorts of social and religious groups, except Palestinians and Muslims.
After Iran attacked Israel last week, speculations about possible Israel’s response to the attack have been rampant. Here, too, the monarchist Chalabis are not only allies of Israel, but some of them are also active participants in the planning for bombing of Iran by Israel. When asked how Israel is deciding where to bomb in Iran in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, , Lt. Col. (Re.) Jonathan Conricus, former spokesman for Israel’s IDF and currently a senior fellow at the FDD, responded that the potential sites are being studied and analyzed by FDD experts, including Ghasseminejad, Behnam Ben Taleblu – another Iranian “senior fellow” – and Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at FDD, a nuclear proliferation expert, and anti-Iran fellow. In other words, the Iranian Chalabis are taking the same route as the original Iraqi one.
But, unlike Iraq where nationalism under Saddam Hussein regime was weak, as he always advocated Pan-Arabism, Iranians are fiercely nationalists, and will never forgive turncoats such as these aspiring Ahmad Chalabis. The Iranian Chalabis must also recall the fate of the Iraqi one: Once the United States achieved its goal of invading and occupying Iraq with the help of Chalabi’s lies and exaggerations, he was unceremoniously disposed of like a piece of dirty napkin; he never rose to power and died in infamy.
