By Theodore Shoebat
The United States government just designated Iran’s military — the Revolutionary Guard — as a “terrorist organization”, as we read in a report from Radio Free Europe:
U.S. President Donald Trump has designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), the first time the United States has labelled another nation’s military as a terrorist group.
Washington will continue to increase financial pressure and raise the costs on Iran “for its support of terrorist activity,” Trump said in a statement.
Tehran responded in kind, announcing a couple of hours later that its top security council has designated the United States a “state sponsor of terrorism” and U.S. forces in the region “terrorist groups.”
The United States has already blacklisted tens of entities and people for affiliations with the IRGC, but not the organization as a whole.
“This designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as an FTO [foreign terrorist organization],” Trump said.
“It underscores the fact that Iran’s actions are fundamentally different from those of other governments.”
“It makes crystal clear the risks of conducting business with, or providing support to, the IRGC,” Trump said. “If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the designation will take effect in one week. Pompeo, speaking to the media in Washington, warned all banks and businesses to end dealings with the IRGC.
The move blocks any assets that IRGC entities may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bars Americans from any transactions with it.
When it takes effect, it will allow Washington to deny entry to people found to have provided the IRGC with “material support” or prosecute them for sanctions violations.
State news agency IRNA reported shortly afterwards that Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has labelled the United States a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
The council blasted Washington’s move as an “illegal and foolish act,” and said that in response, it “declares that it considers the regime of the U.S. a state sponsor of terrorism and the Central Command of America, known as CENTCOM, and all forces related to it terrorist groups,” the statement posted by IRNA said.
CENTCOM’s area of command covers multiple war zones and hot spots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Persian Gulf.
The United States government also backs terrorists.
In a CIA document written in 1985, entitled, Syria: Sunni Opposition to the Minority Alawite Regime, it talks about how the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood could destabilize Syria after the death of Hafez al-Assad:
“When Assad dies, concern among the Alawite elite about Sunni discontent probably will serve to dampen rivalries within the regime and contribute to an orderly succession. The longevity of such a successor regime, however, will depend in part on its ability to replicate Assad’s successful combination of repression and co-optation of the Sunni community. A broad-based popular movement or Islamic revolution appears unlikely, but in the context of a succession crises or in the early stages of a new regime, Sunni officers might seek to take advantage of regime weaknesses to attempt a coup. The Muslim Brotherhood almost certainly would attempt to instigate civil disorders to test the staying power of Assad’s successor as president.”
The US government knew very well that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to topple the Syrian government, and this is why the CIA backed the Muslim Brotherhood to support the policy of destabilization in Syria. In the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the CIA was working in Turkey to use the Turkish government and the Muslim Brotherhood as a conduit to send weapons to the rebels. As the AP reported back in 2012:
The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some anti-tank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries, including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.
While the United States has made the move to classify the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, the US government also made the move to remove this classification of “terrorist organization” from the People’s Mujahideen Of Iran (Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK), a terrorist organization and Islamic-Marxist cult that is been responsible for the deaths of thousands. The US did this under the Obama administration in order to make support for the MEK against the current Iranian regime as legitimate. This has nothing to do with fighting terrorism, since if it was the US would not be backing the MEK which has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, including American citizens. These politicians who go on and on about ‘fighting terrorism,’ will also back the MEK. For example, John Bolton, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani all lobby for the MEK.
So what is this move by the US? It has nothing to do with fighting terrorism and everything to do with maintaining the US global hegemony.
In November of 2018, the Danish government accused Iranian intelligence for planning an assassination of an exiled leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA) in Denmark. Ahvaz is the capital city of Khuzestan, a province of Iran. The region is inhabited by Iranian Arabs who hate the Iranian regime and want to secede and make their own state. The US has a huge focus on Khuzestan not because it cares about the cause of Arab separatists, but because that region holds Iran’s main source of oil.
So, if the Arab separatists in Khuzestan succeed in their mission to separate from Iran, they will cut off Iran from its biggest oil source and bring economic instability, enough to bring forth a revolution. The United States government sees Khuzestan as the joint of Iran’s economic anatomy that needs to be broken in order to cripple the whole body. There is a CIA document that calls Khuzestan “Iran’s Achilles Tendon”.
What they are doing to Iran today, they did to Iraq. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the country was crippled by UN sanctions, and weapons inspections by the UN on Iraq had neutralized Saddam’s nuclear program and forced him to destroy his biological and chemical weapons stockpiles. But this was not enough for the lobby for war. For example, Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, said in early September 2002: “Saddam Hussein’s nuclear-weapons program provides the urgent need for his removal.” But the frenzy around the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was a lie, propaganda, a pretext by which to launch a war. There were documents from both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Israeli Knesset that admitted that much of the intelligence given by Israel to the Bush administration was false. One former Israeli general affirmed that “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.” (See Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby, ch. 7, pp. 229, 235-237)
The propaganda schemes they did to Iraq, they are now doing to Iran, with the US government wanting to use sanctions to cripple its economy and thereby make it more vulnerable for destabilization.
This is what the neoconservatives want. There are also people in the co-called counterjihad — a movement that was officialized by the CIA front, the Center for Security Policy — who want this as well. Last year, Robert Spencer published an article by his colleague Hugh Fitzgerald in which he calls for the US government to arm the Arab separatists in Khuzestan in order to cause a revolution, sever the region and destabilize Iran:
“But if those Arabs were supplied directly with arms, or with the money to buy arms, they could cause a great deal of destruction to the oilfields and thus to the Iranian economy.
Were Iran to lose control of Khuzestan, it would also be losing the region from which 85% of its oil, and 60% of its gas, comes from. In other words, the loss of Khuzestan would destroy the Iranian economy.”
So while these people claim to be ‘fighting the jihad,’ they are in fact pushing for policies that advance Islamism. While people like Giuliani and Bolton will clench their fists against Islamic fundamentalism or communism, they will lobby for a major terrorist organization that is ideologically Islamic and Marxist. The world is inundated with the greatest deceptions; with entities that present a shell of a certain sentiment, only to disappear like a shadow when the fire is blown; with lobbyists that express themselves against one monster, only to keep behind the curtains an even more vitriolic leviathan. Welcome to the world of the lobbyists, where nothing is what it seems. They will scream “justice!” ceaselessly, when they are for injustice. The Pharisees revered the law, and in the name of law crucified their Messiah, and in this they became lawless. They revered justice, and murdered Christ, and in this, became unjust. An excessive fixation on law turns one lawless; an excessive fixation on justice turns one unjust.
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