(HERALD, GOWANS) US hand in attempted Iran colour revolution
US hand in attempted Iran colour revolutionBy Stephen Gowans
AS the head of Freedom House, a CIA-interlocked think-tank that promotes free markets, free enterprise and free trade, Peter Ackerman has been at the forefront of efforts to topple foreign governments that place more emphasis on promoting the welfare of their citizens (and often their own bourgeoisie) than providing export and investment opportunities to US corporations, banks, and investors.
An ex-Wall Street investment banker who was once junk bond trader Michael Milken’s right-hand man, Ackerman’s speciality these days is regime change civil disobedience — training activists in the use of civil disobedience destabilisation techniques to bring down foreign governments.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-Wall Street insiders’ group that brings together corporate CEOs and lawyers, scholars, and government and military officials to recommend foreign policy positions to the US State Department, Ackerman also heads the International Centre for Non-Violent Conflict.
Working in parallel with billionaire financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute and The Albert Einstein Institution, the ICNC deploys civil disobedience specialists to teach "activists how to agitate for change against" governments on Washington’s regime change hit list, "going everywhere from Eastern Europe to train Belarusians to Turkey to coach Iranians."
Ackerman and other civil disobedience imperialists, like Stephen Zunes, a self-styled progressive who acts as chief apologist for Ackerman among leftists who have romantic illusions about "popular" uprisings give their efforts to topple foreign governments the deceptively reassuring name "democracy promotion."
Democracy promotion, a Bush administration official once said, is a rubric to get people to support regime change that cannot be accomplished through military means. Zunes has also sprung to the defence of Gene Sharp, the head of the Albert Einstein Institution, who advised right-wing Venezuelans on how to use civil disobedience to overthrow Hugo Chavez.
More than two years ago, in a March, 2007 interview in The Progressive, Sharp, who says he has been working since 2004 with Iranian dissidents on how to bring down the government in Teheran, predicted that "if somebody doesn’t decide to use military means, it is very likely that there will be a peaceful national struggle there."
In the same interview, Sharp set out his view on how the US should topple governments on its regime change hit list: by using overthrow movements trained in non-violent direct action, rather than military intervention.
This is a view supported by his chief defender, Zunes, who thinks imperialism through non-violence is somehow not imperialism.
Three years ago, and not long after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ackerman, along with Ramin Ahmadi, co-founder of the US State Department-funded Iran Human Rights Document Centre, sketched out a scenario of Iranians using civil disobedience to topple the Iranian government.
In a January 6, 2006 International Herald Tribune article, prophetically titled "Iran’s future? Watch the streets," the pair complained that Ahmadinejad promised "to redistribute wealth to the poor and curb capitalists," and described the new president’s electoral victory as plunging Iranian "society into a mood of despair."
Iranian society hadn’t plunged into despair, at least the large majority that elected Ahmadinejad hadn’t.
Instead, it was the losers, "Iran’s parliamentary reformists" and the wealthy, Western-educated Iranians they represented, who were in despair.
In Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s view, this stratum, a budding comprador class, was equal to Iranian society as a whole, rather than a minority whose interests were about to be curbed by the newly-elected president.
Looking ahead, Ahmadi and his Freedom House co-author, pointed to "a grass-roots movement . . . waiting to be roused in Iran," that would "demand real economic reform," so long as "its cadres" were provided "a clear strategic vision and leadership."
"Grass-roots" by Ackerman’s and Ahamdi’s restrictive definition, was anyone targeted by Ahmadinejad’s redistribution and capitalist-curbing programme. "Economic reform" was giving capital free rein.
The model for overthrowing the income-redistributing, capitalist-curbing Ahmadinejad, they wrote, would be the Polish trade union Solidarity, which worked to destabilise another set of capitalist-unfriendly income-redistributors, the communist government of Poland.
Solidarity — the only trade union Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the CIA and the Wall Street Journal ever liked — was instrumental in the collapse of Polish communism, and more widely, in the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe.
Western corporations and investors seeking export and investment opportunities in Eastern Europe — people represented by Ackerman and Soros — profited handsomely, but for ordinary people, communism’s demise has been a disaster.
Poverty, unemployment, economic insecurity and inequality have soared.
To help Iran’s disgruntled budding comprador class; the pair urged "non-governmental organisations around the world" to "expand their efforts to assist Iranian civil society, women’s groups, unions and journalists. And the global news media," they wrote, should "cover the steady stream of strikes, protests, and other acts of opposition."
In other words, the media should play a role by depicting the Iranian government as deeply unpopular to justify its overthrow.
Significantly, organisations like Freedom House, ICNC, and the Soros Open Society Institute, operating on grants from Western governments, parliaments and corporate foundations — all of which were opposed to Ahmadinejad for his asserting Iran’s right to a self-reliant civilian nuclear power industry and refusal to accelerate the sale of Iran’s state-owned economy to private investors — would provide the strategic vision, leadership, as well as the money and training, for Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s slumbering grassroots movement.
In May of 2005, R Nicholas Burns, then US under-secretary of state for political affairs, said the US was ready to hike funding to groups within Iran seeking regime change. The United States had already spent US$1,5 million in 2004 and US$3 million in 2005 on exile groups with contacts inside Iran.
Burns equated the ramped up spending to "taking a page from the playbook" on Ukraine and Georgia, where, as the New York Times explained," in those countries the United States gave money to the opposition and pro-democracy groups, some of which later supported the peaceful overthrow of the governments in power."
But it would take longer to spark a colour revolution in Iran, Burns warned.
"We don’t have a platform to do it. The country isn’t free enough to do it. It’s a much more oppressive environment than Ukraine was . . . during the Orange Revolution" where the US was able to take advantage of the country’s openness to overturn the election of a pro-Russian government to install a pro-Washington one.
On February 15, 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added US$75 million to the $10 million already earmarked for US government programmes to "support networks for Iranian reformers, political dissidents and human rights activists."
Two-thirds of the additional funding was to be used to "increase television broadcasting to 24 hours a day all week in Farsi into Iran."
The purpose of the broadcasting was to sour the population on the Ahmadinejad government. The country was soon awash in regime change funding, a cornucopia that led some opponents of the government to beseech the United States to tighten its purse strings.
The funding, they said, made all opponents, especially those with Western contacts, appear to be potential conspirators.
The group added that "no credible civil society member would want to be associated with such a fund".
But there were many non-credible ones that did.
Meanwhile, Ackerman’s ICNC was inviting Iranians to workshops to teach them how peaceful revolts in Georgia, the Philippines and elsewhere were set off. Training sessions were held "every month or so, hoping to foment a non-violent conflict in Iran."
Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s comparison of Iran’s aspiring colour revolutionaries to Solidarity is only partly correct. Unlike the former, who tend to be well-heeled, well-educated, and to have spent time abroad, Solidarity was born of a genuinely working class grassroots movement, which had legitimate grievances against Poland’s Communist government.
The grievances of the aspiring colour revolutionaries however, are rooted in a contested election, which the balance of evidence suggests was fair. A Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored poll, carried out three weeks before the election, found that Ahmadinejad led his nearest rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, by a margin of more than two to one, similar to the outcome of the vote.
The head of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, hardly an Ahmadinejad supporter, found no greater irregularities in Iran’s presidential election than in those of Western countries.
On the other hand, claiming that an election is stolen, and using the alleged fraud as a pretext to launch a campaign of civil disobedience, is a hallmark of the regime change programmes Ackerman has been at the centre of.
Where the colour revolutionaries and Solidarity are similar is in serving as the vehicles of the same class.
Solidarity was quickly hijacked by anti-Communist intellectuals who provided the strategic vision and leadership, with the help of financing from Eastern European émigrés assisted by the CIA.
They had no interest in helping the Polish working class, which remained solidly committed to socialism.
They sought, instead, to destabilise the Polish government.
Likewise, Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s slumbering "grassroots" movement has been roused by civil disobedience regime change promoters from outside and wealthy locals who have soaked up pro-imperialist values while studying abroad.
They’ve taken a leaf from Western-backed colour revolutions carried out in other countries, ones Ackerman and company have been instrumental in promoting.
Their interest lies not in the social welfare of the majority of Iranians, who appear to have voted for Ahmadinejad, but in destabilising the Iranian government to serve their own narrow class interests.
Many leftists have turned a blind eye to the class character of Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s "grassroots movement," as well as to the source of its strategic vision and leadership.
They have done so out of infatuation with the romance of a seemingly popular uprising, dislike of Ahmadinejad’s social conservatism, and the mistaken belief that the uprising is about democracy and human rights.
The "grassroots" movement is hardly grassroots, and its goals are hardly the lofty ones leftists have attributed to it.
They are, instead, the goals a wealthy former Wall Street investment banker turned regime change promoter and Washington-insider and wealthy Iranians who have studied at expensive universities in the imperial centre, are able to share in common — toppling a government that stands in the way of their mutual enrichment.
l Stephen Gowans is a Canadian writer and political activist based in Ottawa. This article is reproduced from gowans.wordpress.com
Labels: COLOUR REVOLUTIONS, IRAN, STEPHEN GOWANS
posted by MrK @ 6:57 PM
3 Comments:
It has become quite tiresome to read Stephen Gowans' tirades against Peter Ackerman and his International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a small educational foundation that has never done anything more than teaching and transferring knowledge about nonviolent resistance to whoever asks for it. But that truth doesn't stop Gowans from inventing his own facts, such as: Ackerman's center has done monthly workshops for Iranians and received U.S. government funding. Both of those are untrue, and Mr Gowans was told that years ago, has never adduced or offered proof of his claims, but keeps on making those claims, and inventing new ones. What Gowans never tells you is that Ackerman's center has done workshops for Palestinians, Egyptians, West Papuans, West Saharans and lots of other people's groups struggling against governments supported by the U.S. He doesn't mention that because it would spoil his conspiracy theory that aiding nonviolent resistance is some kind of imperialist plot and that Wall Street is behind resistance movements against regimes that Gowans likes -- such as those in Iran and Zimbabwe -- based on Ackerman's having worked on Wall Street over 20 years ago. Gowans' obsession with Ackerman would be quaint if it weren't rubbish.
Tiresome indeed.
Gowans should actually read Ackerman and talk to some who have benefitted from his work. Call me at 503 327 8250 at the Catholic Worker community I live in and we can talk, Mr Gowans. Peter Ackerman and his associates know that my work centers on opposing US militarism--it's what I practice and what I train and what I teach--and they continue to support my work. Mr Gowans, ICNC has helped me spread this knowledge to many others who offer nonviolent resistance to US militarism both within and outside the US. We work hard, we sacrifice our jobs, homes and freedom and we try to offer hospitality to those who are victims of this war system and we use ICNC materials constantly. Those materials help us win. Call me. Come visit. Really. Get Out There and you'll stop your petty defense of dictators like Ahmadinijad, who needs to be overthrown with robust nonviolence. It takes a purblind hardcore so-called leftist to attack those of us who are actually making progress toward blunting and reversing US militarism or those who work to support and ally themselves with brave Iranians--or North Koreans, or West Papuans, for example--who face bullets and remain courageous. Really, Mr Gowan, get out of your office, your basement, and come visit. I'll introduce you around and feed you the beans we eat here.
Among the many false claims in this article is that I somehow defend imperialism. I have never defended imperialism in any way, shape or form, and have struggled most of my life against U.S. intervention. Materials produced by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and by Gene Sharp have been used by Palestians, Western Saharans, Egyptians, West Papuans, Thais, and others struggling against U.S.-backed regimes, as well as activists fighting neo-liberal globalization and U.S. militarism.
Also, Ackerman is no longer associated with Freedom House, having unsuccessfully tried to wean the organization from its financial ties from the U.S. government.
Given all the very real conspiracies by imperialists out there, it is perplexing as to why Gowans insists on making ones up.
--SZ
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