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TOP STORIES
The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday
that a string of anti-government protests were over after six days of
unrest. In comments to the semiofficial Fars news agency, Mohammad
Ali Jafari said that only 15,000 people had turned out at the height
of the rallies and that the main "troublemakers" have been
arrested.
U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled support for
anti-government protests in Iran, but in two weeks he faces a
decision on U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic that suddenly
seems riskier than it did a week ago. The six days of demonstrations
in several Iranian cities began over economic conditions, and Trump
must decide by mid-January whether to continue waiving U.S. sanctions
on Iran's oil exports under the terms of an international nuclear
deal.
After some delay, the European Union has called the
deaths of Iranians over nearly a week of protests
"inexcusable," but its members have so far pushed back
against American efforts to issue a more full-throated, joint
condemnation. The Europeans are especially anxious that President
Trump may use the protests in Iran as a reason to reimpose United
States economic sanctions on Iran, possibly killing the multilateral
deal that limited the country's nuclear program.
UANI IN THE NEWS
I would say the protests are going to linger. But they
could go in a couple of different directions based upon events that
are probably beyond anyone's control, in terms of the extent of any
uptick in protester violence and excessive force or missteps by
security forces. I think that in terms of the regime itself, there is
no indication that the size of the protests is sufficient to cause
the regime to collapse, nor is there evidence that security forces
are beginning to fall apart, refuse to obey orders, or join the
protesters. Therefore the regime will likely linger, perhaps for
years. But I think, in the end, Iran's political and social fabric
will have been changed by these events. This is the most dramatic
unrest Iran has seen since 1979, and that is something that the
regime will not be able to paint over.
[T]the lesson I draw from 2009 is that the United States
should not be silent. The administration should matter-of-factly,
without hype, take note of the protests and call attention to the
economic grievances of the demonstrations, which are surely compounded
by Iran's adventurism in the Middle East. The protestors are asking
why their money is spent in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza-and the
administration should be putting out the estimates of what the
Islamic republic is actually spending.
The protests sweeping Iran belie the once popular notion
that the spirit of the Green Revolution that nearly toppled the
Islamic Republic in 2009 has been extinguished. It is possible that
an Islamist regime with little compunction about killing its own citizens
will survive this latest challenge to its authority. Should it
survive, the Iranian theocracy will not be the same, with the
principal casualty of this week being the presidency of Hassan
Rouhani. As the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his hardline disciples
assess their predicament, they are likely to hunker down and insist
on more repression at home... All this spells doom for the Republic
of Virtue. The Islamic Republic is entering a period of prolonged
transition where it will no longer be able to proffer a theocracy
with a human face. In the end, Iran's revolution is an impossible
one, as it created a theocracy that cannot reform itself and
accommodate the aspirations of its restless and youthful citizens.
The tragedy of Ali Khamenei is that in consolidating his revolution,
he is ensuring the eventual demise of his regime.
IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL
Stunning and important protests in Iran have rightly
dominated the headlines in recent days, but another consequential
moment is fast approaching for Iran and the West.... Since President
Trump's decision in October not to certify the Iran nuclear deal, Britain,
France and Germany have sent a steady stream of emissaries to
Washington to press the administration to delay or water down efforts
to fix what it sees as a flawed agreement. There is a much more
constructive way forward, however - if the Europeans can grab on to
it before it evaporates.
IRAN PROTESTS
The last administration's refusal to act [during the
2009 Green Revolution] ultimately emboldened Iran's tyrannical rulers
to crack down on the dissent... Today, the Iranian people are once
again rising up to demand freedom and opportunity, and under
President Trump, the United States is standing with them. This time,
we will not be silent.
The Iranian government has called on the messaging app
Telegram to block "terrorist channels" in an effort to
quell protests, according to the state-run media outlet IRIB.
"If [the] Telegram manager does not respect Iranians' demand,
the application will be closed completely," Iran's Minister of
Communications and Information Technology, Mohammad-Javad Azari
Jahromi said on Wednesday.
The White House plans to impose sanctions against
Iranian regime forces responsible for a violent crackdown on
protests, administration officials said Wednesday, as the president
vowed to support Iranian demonstrators who have taken to the streets.
The White House has seized on anti-government protests
rocking Iran as glittering vindication of its criticisms of the Obama
administration's approach to the leadership in Tehran. President
Donald Trump and other senior administration figures are loudly
cheering the Iranian demonstrators, sensing an opportunity for both
an international win and a chance to make up for what they have long
declared as one of President Barack Obama's great failures.
President Donald Trump appeared to back a
"fight" to overthrow of Iran's theocracy by the growing
ranks of protesters on Wednesday, only to delete the post a minute
later and rephrase it using more diplomatic language-the latest
controversial deletion for a president accused of violating laws to
protect administration records.
Instead of continuing to protect the supreme leader and
his tyrannical regime, the White House and Congress should move in a
new direction - backing policies that hold the regime accountable and
siding with the Iranian people.
The so-far leaderless protests have already exposed a
major internal weakness of the Islamic Republic just as it enjoyed
unprecedented regional sway, with significant military and political
successes in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon following the defeat of Islamic
State.
The working-class anger behind a week of unrest in Iran
will pose an increasingly potent challenge to Tehran's ruling clerics
as economic and social pressures mount, even if the current protests
peter out, analysts said Wednesday.
Anti-government protests continue across Iran after six
days, and the ruling mullahs and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC) are threatening a crackdown that could get ugly. The world
should support this fight for freedom, which is exposing the
illusions about Iran that dominated the Obama Administration.
SANCTIONS ENFORCEMENT
A Turkish banker was convicted of helping Iran evade
U.S. financial sanctions in a verdict likely to further strain
relations between Turkey and the U.S.
TERRORISM AND EXTREMISM
The head of Lebanon's powerful Tehran-backed Hezbollah
terror group said Wednesday he was confident protests in Iran would
be brought under control and leave US President Donald Trump
disappointed. "There is nothing to worry about and what happened
in Iran is well contained," Hassan Nasrallah said in an
interview to Al-Mayadeen, a TV channel close to his movement.
Israel said on Wednesday it had cracked a Palestinian
militant cell suspected of having been recruited and handled by
Iranian intelligence officers who worked out of South Africa, but the
suspects' lawyer denied the charges.
HUMAN RIGHTS
United Nations human rights experts called on Iran to
spare the life of a man, due to be executed on Thursday, who was
convicted of raping and killing a child when he was a juvenile. Amirhossein
Pourjafar, who was 16 when he was sentenced to death in September
2016, a year after the crime, is among more than 80 youths known to
be on death row in the Islamic Republic.
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