A Neo-Conservative International Targets Iran - (names)

[donsu]

http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=27

Before the week is out, it’s worth noting the “Democracy & Security” conference in Prague last Monday and Tuesday where Bush, on his way to the G-8 Summit in Heiligendamm, confirmed once more — just in case his tightening embrace over the past year of Sunni-led authoritarian regimes around the Middle East had provoked any doubts — his commitment to spreading freedom and defeating tyranny throughout the world, particularly in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan. Held under the auspices of the Czech Foreign Ministry and Prague’s municipal government, the meeting was organized by the Prague Security Studies Institute (PSSI), the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Likudist Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and Spain’s Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis (FAES) headed by former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

The conference’s official website can be found here and is certainly worth a visit as are the program, and the list of participants, several of whom, notably Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) president Clifford May, European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) executive director Roberta Bonazzi, The Wall Street Journal’s foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, and PSSI’s Jiri Schneider, must have sported suntans earned at the previous week’s off-the-record Iran conference that FDD convened in the Bahamas and about which I wrote in two previous posts here and here.

Heralded last month by the Weekly Standard (whose editor, Bill Kristol, serves on the Shalem Foundation’s board of directors) in an article entitled “Dissidents Unite!,” the conference was convened by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Aznar, and the former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. Sharansky, chairman of both the Adelson Institute and of One Jerusalem, a group created to oppose any move under the Oslo peace process to to recognise Palestinian sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem, is a former Soviet refusenik whose 2004 book, ‘The Case for Democracy,’ helped inspire Bush’s ringing 2005 Inaugural Address (even if Sharansky’s own democratic credentials ring a little hollow. Aznar and Havel are co-chairs of the “international” section of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which was launched by FDD in June 2004 and whose website is www.fightingterror.org. Sen. Joe Lieberman, an honorary co-chairman of CPD, keynoted the opening session. In other words, the conference constituted a kind of “Neo-Conservative International” designed to rally support for “dissidents,” primarily from the Islamic world, and give them hope that “regime change” in their countries is possible much as it was in the former Soviet bloc almost 20 years ago.

Indeed, besides FDD’s May, Sharansky and Lieberman, a familiar clutch of U.S. hawks took part in the proceedings, including an all-star contingent from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) consisting of Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Michael Novak, Joshua Muravchik, and Reuel Marc Gerecht; Herb London, John O’Sullivan, and Anne Bayefsky from the Hudson Institute; Bruce Jackson a former director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC); Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution; the FDD’s Walid Phares; and Devon Cross, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB), director of the London-based Policy Forum on International Security, and sister of Frank Gaffney, the president of the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy (CSP). A close Gaffney associate and co-founder of PSSI, Roger W. Robinson, Jr., who is also a leading figure in the Iran divestment campaign here, was also in attendance, along with some major funders of pro-Likud, neo-conservative groups, such as Nina Rosenwald, Ronald Lauder, as well as Miriam and Sheldon Adelson.

In addition to Bush himself, other U.S. government officials who participated in the conference included Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes; the new president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and AEI alumnus, Jeffrey Gedmin; Harold Rhode, a Pentagon official and close associate of AEI’s Michael Ledeen who was involved in back-channel talks with Manucher Ghorbanifar about encouraging “regime change” in Iran in 2003; and Joe Wood, identified in the participants’ list as the deputy assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs in the Office of the Vice President at the White House.
-snip-
---------------------------------------------

most of the neo con mob in one place. too bad the earth didn't open up and devour them.

[wildhorses]

1. where's a suicide bomber when you need one?

:hide:

[TwilightGardener]

4. LOL! Right place, right time.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Has Washington Found its Iranian Chalabi?

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/fakhravar.html



This past summer, an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post under the byline of Richard Perle, the influential former Pentagon adviser who was a chief booster of Ahmed Chalabi in the run-up to the war in Iraq. As he had prior to the invasion of Iraq, Perle urged the Bush administration to shun appeasement and take an uncompromising stand toward Tehran; as with Iraq, he argued that a hard line was critical to help the population overthrow a brutal regime. And once again, Perle had an exile leader he wanted America to know about: Amir Abbas Fakhravar, “an Iranian dissident student leader who escaped first from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, then, after months in hiding, from Iran.”

Fakhravar, Perle wrote, had believed George W. Bush’s promise to Muslim dissidents that “when you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.” Now, as the administration was mulling whether to negotiate with Iran, Perle worried that “the proponents of accommodation with Tehran will regard the struggle for freedom in Iran as an obstacle to their new diplomacy.”

It was a rousing call to arms for conservatives, many of whom are convinced that American interests in the Middle East depend on fomenting an uprising in Iran, and who have been frustrated in their search for just the right allies. The Iranian opposition is deeply fractured, and a number of its leading figures are explicitly against U.S. intervention. Iran’s best-known dissident, journalist Akbar Ganji, rejected invitations to meet with administration officials on a recent U.S. visit, and asked instead to see the United Nations’ Kofi Annan and Noam Chomsky. “I advocate change of the regime in Iran,” Ganji told me in July. “But that regime must be changed by Iranians themselves.”

Enter Fakhravar, who is more inclined to say exactly what the hawks want to hear. He told me that Iran’s president wants to wipe Israel off the map, and that “any movement or any action whatsoever” by the United States would “help or enhance the people to rise up.” All the student movement in Iran needed to overthrow the regime, he said, was “a little bit of coordination, organization, and training.”

[seemslikeadream]

3. They're coming to help us?

http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=12024

The “Prague Document” calls on governments and individuals in the free world to help those living in “societies ruled by fear and repression.”

[whistle]

5. Well, coming from neoconservatives that is a total bullshit statement

....neocons want a tight fascist authoritarian rule established around the world and the U.S. constitution keeps tripping them up. So guess what, they plan to sneak in a counterfeit version when nobody is looking with alterations.