Trump’s State Department spent over $1m in Iran to exploit unrest for ‘regime change’, documents reveal
At
the end of 2017, a dozen cities across Iran, including the capital
Tehran, were rocked by spontaneous protests which continued into the
New Year. What role did the United States play?
Part
7 - Mobilizing a citizen uprising?
NED
records describing these projects show that State Department funding
has gone to projects working with a range of Iranian groups on the
ground.
One
describes its mission being to “engage members of the Iranian
intelligentsia in public deliberation on the social, economic, and
political prospects of a democratic Iran”. Another refers to
the instrumentalization of human rights activism to “enhance
communication and information access for Iranian activists.”
One
project aims to develop and consolidate a network of “democratically
minded jurists in Iran.” A further project says its objective
is “to galvanize citizens to press for greater transparency and
accountability,” and yet another explains that the Iran-based
grant recipient “will build the capacity of Iranian citizens to
conduct community-level political process monitoring through a
focused training program.”
Insight:
The consistent pattern with all State Department-funded ‘democracy
promotion’ projects in Iran is that they target genuine issues
facing Iranian citizens, but exploit them to undermine the legitimacy
of the regime.
One NED
project funded by the State Department in 2016, for instance, seeks
to exploit Iran’s escalating water crisis to ramp up hostility
toward the government. According to the NED, the project’s goal is:
“To
mobilize public participation in initiatives aimed at ending
widespread water mismanagement by national and local authorities.
Project activities will raise civil society and public awareness of
the role that authorities’ mismanagement of water has played in
Iran’s current drought conditions, endeavoring to elevate the issue
for debate in the public political sphere.”
The US
foreign policy establishment has closely watched the impact of Iran’s
water crisis over the last few years. A recent Scientific American
piece, for instance, reports the observations of senior US policy
wonks from the Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution, which have
significant influence on high-level US foreign policy discourse.
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