Shah's son Reza Pahlavi wants help for Iran's opposition

Reza Pahlavi, whose father, the shah of Iran, was toppled from power 31 years ago, said Thursday the international community must step up its support for Iran's opposition movement and stop focusing on the country's nuclear program.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Pahlavi said nations such as the United States should not "even bother" with a new round of sanctions regarding Iran's nuclear program, if punitive measures merely maintain the status quo.

Instead, he suggested the kind of encouragement that helped end South Africa's apartheid system and influenced the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Pahlavi, 50, said that should include dialogue with Iran's opposition, which has kept up periodic street protests in the country since the disputed June presidential elections despite a fierce crackdown.

He also said the opposition needs outside technological support to beat government eavesdropping and Internet crackdowns in Iran, and to "stay connected" with the outside world.

"The world is facing a regime today that is totalitarian, racist, fascist, and yet what has been done about it?" he said in Paris during a visit from the U.S., where he lives outside Washington D.C.

"To this day no one has officially said ... enough is enough," he said.

As he spoke, Iran celebrated the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and the overthrow of Pahlavi's father, the late Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The shah's son said Western leaders must reach out to Iran's opposition movement, but instead they have displayed "bashfulness," "hesitancy" or even "passivity."

He criticized what he called President Barack Obama's tepid outreach to the Iranian people and their exiled opposition.

He noted that 40 Nobel Prize winners appealed to Obama and other world leaders this week in a New York Times ad to let the Iranian people "know that we are on their side."

"I never thought I would see the day when Joan Baez sings ... in Farsi," Pahlavi said, referring to the folk singer's recent version of "We Shall Overcome" -- sung partially in the Iranian language. "For God's sake, it has become an international cry" going unheeded by world leaders.

Pahlavi recommended "tacit" dialogue with Iran's opposition and diplomatic outreach to isolate the regime.

Iranian officials claim foreign powers are behind the country's reform movement, but Pahlavi insisted that is not correct.

Western nations are pressing for a possible fourth set of U.N. sanctions on Iran for its failure to comply with U.N. resolutions aimed at guaranteeing it cannot produce nuclear weapons.

Pahlavi said a window of opportunity may slip away while the world is "dilly-dallying" over sanctions, instead of focusing on issues such as human rights abuses in Iran.

"External sanctions against the regime do not suffice. You have to bring into your calculation ... an element of pressure from within," he said. "And the only way (to) do that is by strengthening the hand of the people inside the country."

If sanctions are "going to be all you're going to be doing while keeping the status quo, don't even bother," he said.

Pahlavi said he wants to see a peaceful transition, via civil disobedience, to a parliamentary democracy with a "clear separation of religion from government."

He said he favors a referendum so Iranians can choose their form of government, and he predicted change could come "within a matter of months -- if not maybe a couple of years tops" -- if society is "empowered" and dialogue not limited to the regime.

"Nothing bars the world from having a line of dialogue with the opposition and that, strangely, has been absent," he said.

The level of support that Pahlavi or other exiled opposition movements have inside Iran today is unclear. Three decades after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian youth, the majority population, has never known the country as a monarchy.

Last month, authorities hanged two men convicted of belonging to outlawed monarchist groups and plotting to overthrow the Islamic regime.

WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT ON FEB 11TH FROM ISLAMIC IRAN

It all depends to what degree Iran wants to leave its fingerprints directly on the events. The analysis below is a partial and not a comprehensive list. Some givens: 1. Supreme Ruler Ali Khamenei no longer has many Iranians in his personal bodyguards and is protected by the dregs of Palestinian prisons his son Mojtaba imported into Iran via flights into South Iran including into Kish Island. 2. Some 15,000 of these are the worst criminals he could find and the only triage was that they had to have bodybuilder physiques and preferably be in prison for murder or other violent crimes. 3. These 15,000 crew hit squads were also used for the murder and torture of the protestors and demonstrators and Mojtaba not only participated frequently in torture sessions in Kahrizak prison but enjoyed raping the detainees. Whether he limited himself just to girls and women has been hard to establish as young men and boys were treated as sex objects on a regular basis in all the prisons, specially the privately run 100 or so secret ones that report only to their bandit Mullah leaders and do not officially exist. He apparently personally took part in conducting horrible, barbaric tortures and enjoyed watching the gang rapes and frequently joined in, spending an inordinately unusual amount of time in the prisons, monitoring the torture of demonstrators. 4. His self-proclaimed, Imam father, Supreme Ruler Ali Khamenei has put his faith on Palestinians and no Iranian can buy a yard of land around the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, which has been repopulated by Sunni (not Shia) Palestinians! The shrine has enormous revenues he siphons off and is guarded by them. 5. This symbiotic Palestinian relationship leads to his hatred for Israel and serious declarations of imminent destruction of it. 6. 12th Imam, Hojatieh, adherent Ahmadi-Nejad has his own lunatic pull toward annihilating Israel and earning his 72 virgins in paradise as an act of obeisance for the End Times 12th Imam. With less and less to lose every day in a no win position and clashing wills with Khamenei, Ahmadi-Nejad will tend to try to go out in a blaze of glory with a huge act of destruction in the name of Shea Islam. 7. Suppression of the demonstrations against the regime on Feb 11th, while perhaps brutal and at the cost of thousands of lives with machine gunfire coming from the new Revolutionary Guard acquisition of armed pilotless helicopters may be an almost side issue for Khamenei and Ahmadi-Nejad. They have a global stage on which they want to play, knowing they may not survive the peoples' rebellion on Feb 11th. 8. A Russian physicist, who worked in Iran for ten years has just leaked that Iran already has nuclear weapon capability. In addition to the nuclear material they acquired as far back as the late 80's and early 90's from Ukraine and had retrofitted onto their Shahab missiles by North Korea in reverse engineered nose cones.8. With huge fortunes, Khamenei and some of the top regime Mullahs like Rafsanjani may flee the country or at least park their families in other countries. Khamenei was reported to have sent most of his and his wife's family to Russia some time back.

Other factors come into play but this provides a stage setting for what may be done by the Islamic regime, remembering that they are Shia as opposed to Saudi Arabia Sunnis. And they have hundreds of Al Qaeda sheltering in Iran and others with who they are in contact in Yemen, whose northern mountain tribes are Shia descendants of Zeid, son of Imam Ali (the Prophet's son-in-law) and founder of the Shia sect of Islam.

Here are possible attacks or actions by the Islamic regime in Iran in no particular order of importance and could be in tandem or in combination: 1. A nuclear "test" by Iran on a target in the region, including on "enemy" naval warships as part of ostensibly protecting itself against a perceived invasion . 2. A nuclear missile or two sent at Israel, which is well within range and just one exploding in Central Israel would basically wipe out most of the country's population and make the rest uninhabitable. 3. Nuclear missiles sent at New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C., any one of them or all three, launched from retrofitted cargo ships, possibly rust buckets rebuilt in West Africa, probably Somalia and sailed close to these three ports, bringing them all into easy range.MORE LIKELY than this very violent attack with lots of dead would be to launch missiles at Israel, and the three U.S. cities above and explode nuclear EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) weapons above them. Optimum height to strength reportedly about 40,000 feet above them. The higher the wider the circumference but unless the force were also greater a lesser "damage" result.

Note Iran has had EMP capability for many years.

For "damage" read a disruption of any and all unshielded electronic circuitry - computers, traffic lights, trains, ships, automobiles, trucks, ports, subways to some degree, computer dependent equipment in hospitals, banks, Wall Street, cell phones, landline phones, radios, TV's, gas stations etc., just to name a limited number of obvious failures.

AND NOT ONE LIFE WOULD BE LOST from the explosions, which destroy circuitry but do not harm human or animal life! MEANWHILE - Yemeni Shia pro-Iran terrorists, perhaps assisted by Al Qaeda forces in Yemen, would attack (infiltrating overland) major Saudi Arabian oil installations, refineries and destroy as much of these as possible, thus harming Western economies and interests. Thus the Sunni Arabs, who consider Shia Moslems as infidels, would be punished and crippled. Meanwhile Islamic Iran retaliation - for ensuing reaction by the West - might take the following forms and escalate: a) An immediate barrage of thousands of prepositioned short range rockets at Saudi and Persian Gulf States, specially oil and financial installations of buildings. b) A similar barrage on Israel from Lebanon, Syria and by Palestinian Hamas in Gaza and the 5,000 Palestinian Special Forces Obama has been training in Jordan with American Generals in charge. c) Rockets fired at USA and Coalition troops in Iraq from within Iran. d) Bomb attacks on US businesses around the world such as Starbucks, hamburger chains etc., and U.S. bank branches and where they can our Embassies and Consulates. MOST DEMORALIZING....Attacks within THE USA: Some estimated 40,000 Islamist suicide bombers have been gathered in the USA over the past 15-years, newly trained ones have been entering under a variety of visas in a steady flow during the last few years and are waiting instructions to deploy. Targets will include as many soft targets as can be reached with the most terrifying results.

Shopping malls, IED explosives on our freeways hitting random targets but specifically tanker trucks.

Major and minor airport terminals will become dangerous to visit as suiciders kill air passengers as well as at major train and bus terminals.Directed charge explosives will easily bring down electricity network towers crippling the nation's power grids.PERHAPS WORST OF ALL is the terrorist kidnapping of our school children, which appears to have been in the planning stages for some time. a) There are some 40 school buses which have "disappeared" around the nation, yes, they are no longer where they should be and nobody knows where they are. b) An increasingly large number of school bus drivers are Afghan and other Islamic nationalities. c) In the event a series of terrorist attacks and a sudden need to send children home rapidly, which school will carefully check out the drivers who show up? And how could they check the drivers' validity anyway? All the terrorists need to say is that they were sent to help with the emergency. Busloads of our children might never make it home either to be killed in a sadistic retaliation for an attack on Iran or as hostages. d) School buses become excellent cover for terrorists to move arms and personnel among the children they steal, who become shields, or apparently empty with equipment and men hidden on the floor. Who has time to check out yellow school buses when chaos abounds?Ambulances are regularly used to smuggle arms and people in Palestinian territories, often displaying United Nations emblems, so not a new idea. AND FINALLY we face poisoned food and water. Apparently, a large number of slaughter houses are operated by Islamists. Examples of tainted food and food products on Supermarket shelves have reached the news from time to time. A concerted effort would fall into place as terrorists attack another soft target with rudimentary chemicals and easy access.