Iranian dissident writer Heshmat Alavi, wrote on 24 July, that advocates of appeasement toward Iran are claiming that any firm policy on Tehran will lead to war.

Alavi writes, “As the Trump White House is pending its Iran policy there is increasing support for regime change. All the while the Iran appeasement camp are boosting their efforts of claiming any firm policy on Tehran will lead to war. The question is do the measures professed by this party truly prevent war?”

In early July, when Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) recently held its annual convention in Paris, with Trump “emissaries” such as “former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaking powerfully of regime change in Iran, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton went as far as declaring the Iranian regime will not witness its 40th anniversary in February 2019,” says Alavi.

He added, “In response, Iran and its lobbies in the West, terrified of such a surge behind the NCRI as the sole alternative able to bring about true change in Iran, have not remained silent. Iran apologists are yet again seen resorting to the old tactic of warning about a new war in the Middle East”.

“For decades now pro-Iranian regime writers have cautioned against adopting a firm policy on Tehran, allowing the mullahs’ regime to plunge the entire Middle East into havoc,” according to Alavi. “As we speak Iraq, Syria and Yemen are in ruins thanks to Iran’s support of proxy elements fueling sectarian conflicts and deadly civil wars. The war in Afghanistan has yet to finalize after 16 years, and reports continue of Iran supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in this country.”

Iran continues to funnel millions of dollars and arms to its offspring, the Hezbollah, established by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) in 1982, and as a result, Lebanon has yet to witness political stability.

In a Townhall piece, Pat Buchanan argues, “After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, would America and the world be well-served by a war with Iran that could explode into a Sunni-Shiite religious war across the Middle East?”

Former MEP Struan Stevenson sheds light on such the phenomenon of Iran engulfing Iraq and Syria. “800,000 people have been rendered homeless from Mosul alone, millions when you count the refugees who fled from Ramadi and Fallujah. Thousands of innocent Sunni civilians have been killed, and tens of thousands among them were injured,” he wrote in a recent Al Arabiya article.

After the 2003 Iraq war all US troops were pulled out of Iraq in 2011. It is said that this left Iraq in the hands Iran, who supports al-Maliki in Iraq, as well as Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both financially and logistically. Next came ISIS, who massacred Syria’s Sunnis, parallel to Maliki’s crackdown of the Iraq’s Sunni minority. ISIS spread, first in Iraq and Syria, and then throughout the Middle East, Europe and beyond.

The regime in Iran actually benefited extremely from the rise of ISIS to claim legitimate its involvement in Iraq and Syria through Shiite proxy groups.

Trita Parsi, head of the so-called “National Iranian American Council”, says that war will be bad for business, and cheers on diplomacy to encourage business. Yet he neglects Iran’s own interference in the Middle East.

Engagement has not worked, and wars in the Middle East have been disastrous. The Trump administration is weighing regime change as policy regarding Iran, and the international community has the opportunity to finally adopt the right policy on Iran by backing the Iranian people and their organized opposition, the NCRI. This organization only needs the international community to recognize their struggle and end the disastrous Iran appeasement approach.