Raymond Tanter, a former senior member of the US National Security Council in the 1980s and Paulo Casaca, a former member of the European Parliament until 2009, discussed the national security topic following speeches by both US presidential candidates earlier this summer.
Tanter, the head of Iran Policy Committee Publishing, and Casaca, the director of the South Asia Democratic Forum,
The pair quoted Mike Pompeo, a leader of the U.S. House of Representatives Joint Task Force on Intelligence Analysis for the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), who released a report on August 10, that asked if intelligence was manipulated to put a positive spin on efforts to combat the Islamic State.
Their piece read: “That report might provide evidence of a fictitious narrative by Team Obama that the war on terror was going so well there was no need to redeploy U.S combat troops to Iraq or deploy them to Syria.”
They report that the Iran deal was easy to sell because of Iran’s complicated visa process which provides obstacles to foreign journalists who might ask “tough questions” which led to Ben Rhodes—a low-level White House staffer-shaping the current regime as moderate, despite no evidence to distinguish so-called moderates from hardliners.
David Samuels of The New York Times wrote: “By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbours and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making.”
Tanter and Casaca state that the only real moderates are the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) and those are the people that Washington should listen to.
Iran has a long history of oppressing those who oppose them in any way; including the execution of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.
