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
2 - The looming water crisis and mismanagement of resources
Iran’s
unrest has mostly been driven by a convergence of domestic
ecological, energy and economic crises. The State Department has
sought to exploit these crises to undermine the legitimacy of the
regime, by funding opposition groups as well as anti-regime
broadcasting to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year.
One
State Department funding document, for instance, refers to a project
to use Iran’s growing water crisis to drum up public anger against
regime “mismanagement”.
To
date, US government records show that the Trump administration has
spent over $1m, at least, since 2016, on financing anti-regime
activism within Iran.
The
policy is not new, though. Altogether, since 2006, successive US
administrations have invested tens of millions of dollars a year on
‘democracy promotion’ efforts in Iran.
Much of
the media programming funded by the State Department has focused on
glorifying the reign of the Shah of Iran, the brutal US-UK backed
dictator who was deposed by the 1979 revolution. The propaganda
appears to have worked, with many participants in the latest protests
calling for the Shah’s exiled son, Reza Pahlavi, to return to power
in Iran.
Axiom:
New US government documents reveal that the Trump administration is
intensifying efforts to undermine the Iranian regime, through a
combination of diplomatic pressure, military encroachment, and
continuing financing of domestic opposition groups.
Two
Congressional documents published early last year, and one released
just a month before the protests, throw light on the Trump
administration’s policy of escalation in Iran. The documents are
research reports published by the Congressional Research Service
written by Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst specialising in
Iran, Iraq and the Gulf states.
One
document, ‘Iran’s Foreign and Defense Policies’ dated February
6, 2017, describes how the administration’s announcement placing
Iran “officially on notice” could signal that “the new
Administration might change US rules of engagement to include the use
of deadly force in future incidents.”
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