NCRI – Iran’s regime has a “legitimacy deficit” and fears any challenges to its rule and as such is “jailing and executing people who pose a political challenge,” said Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield, a former senior United States official.
In an interview on Iran News Update’s YouTube page, Amb. Bloomfield criticized the Obama administration for not considering Iran’s human rights violations as a factor in the nuclear agreement made with the mullahs’ regime in 2015.
“This raises the question of whether the United States has been ignoring one of the most egregious violators of human rights in the world, and ignoring the plight of the individuals who are being detained and jailed and tortured and executed in Iran,” said Amb. Bloomfield who previously served as Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs in the U.S. State Department from 2001 until 2005.
“I do think that there is a refocusing that is needed as to what should be the appropriate approach to the behavior of the ruling regime in Iran.”
Amb. Bloomfield said he does not believe that international trade deals would encourage the regime to reduce the number of executions in carries out annually.
“Most of the major contracts that European leaders are signing with the regime are certainly with Iranian entities where profits will flow to the clerics, and to the foundations they control,” he said.
“President Rouhani came into office in mid-2013 talking about reform. He brought in the Foreign Minister Zarif; both these men speak good English and they engaged in social media campaigns in English to charm the West. But at the same time his Justice Minister is guilty of crimes against humanity from 1988, and so it was, it seems to me they are putting up two faces to the public.”
“I think there is one acid test that could be posed for those who claim to be advancing ‘reform’ inside Iran. And that is, it has to do with the key point in the Constitution that Ayatollah Khomeini introduced in 1979, when he combined religious devotion and political legitimacy, for the first time in hundreds of years; the same thing that ISIS is going to try to do. Which is to say, the Caliphate which is the element that makes the Supreme Leader essentially the embodiment of the twelfth Imam of the descendent of the prophet; this needs to be changed. And if someone in Iran is willing to say ‘I am a reformer, and I propose to remove this from the constitution, and no longer give the Supreme Leader and the Assembly of experts – the Guardian Council – over-riding power, that could be proof that they’re willing to move Iran back into the modern age.”
“I will tell you that I’ve been a political appointee in the United States, and if you are being granted a position by a political party they investigate very carefully to make sure that you will not bring embarrassment to the President of the White House; but in Iran everyone who wants to run for office is investigated by the Basij, who puts together a folder and brings it the Guardian Council to review, to see if this person is loyal enough to the Supreme Leader, or has shown any kind of deviationist tendencies. So they really are imposing a severe loyalty test to the Supreme Leader before anyone is allowed to run.”
Amb. Bloomfield suggested that the mullahs’ regime is in a weak state.
“I interpret most of their behavior as a reaction to the weakness of their legitimacy; and mostly defensive in nature, and which makes them very dangerous.”
“They’re trying both through coercion and charm to buy time because, as I just said, most of the leaders have nowhere else to go. If they were not behind the shield of power they could not survive as free citizens in the world given the crimes on their personal dossier. They would not be able to walk as free men.”
