US Neocons' New Overtures to Terrorist Opposition Group in Iran, Part 1

Ever since the Islamic revolution of February 1979 in Iran that toppled the pro-United States dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran has been at the forefront of news in the Western world, and in particular in the United States. The hostage crisis of November 1979 to January 1981, during which 53 Americans were held hostage after Islamic leftist students had overrun the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, created permanent scars in the American people's conscience and pride. The Iran-Iraq war from September 1980 to July 1988, which began when Saddam Hussein ordered his army to invade Iran after being encouraged and supported by the US, kept Iran in the news. When moderate reformist Mohammad Khatami won Iran's presidential election in a landslide in May 1997 and again in June 2001, there was hope that the US-Iran relations would gradually improve.

But on August 14, 2002, an Iranian opposition group in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), held a press conference in which a spokesman for the NCRI, Alireza Jafarzadeh, revealed the existence of "two secret nuclear facilities in Iran, namely, the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and a plant for producing heavy water in Arak. What many people did not know at that time was that the NCRI is the political arm of the Mojahedin-e Khalgh-e Organization (MKO) of Iran, an exiled opposition group that has been listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department since 1997. The revelation, followed by then-president Mohammad Khatami's formal announcement of the two nuclear facilities on February 9, 2003, created a deep new crisis between Iran and the United States that still persists, even though Iran had not violated its international obligations toward the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by not revealing the existence of the facilities. It also put the NCRI and MKO on the political map in the sense that the public in the West began learning more about the two, which are in fact one and the same.

Most recently, US neoconservatives have begun supporting MKO. They have been lobbying the State Department to take MKO off its list of terrorist organizations and have even advocated arming the organization to topple the regime in Tehran, without knowing almost anything about its history, ideology and leadership. What is the ideology of MKO? Who are its leaders? How significant is its base of support within Iran? What kind of government will MKO lead, if it ever comes to power in Iran?

http://www.truth-out.org/us-neocons-new-overtures-irans-mko-recall-history-resistance-and-co-opting-part-1/1308332237