TEHRAN, 26 July 2004 — Iran’s Foreign Ministry yesterday branded as “daydreamers” US senators who have sponsored a bill aimed at toppling Tehran’s Islamic government by supporting opposition groups inside and outside the country.
Republican senators Rick Santorum, representing Pennsylvania, and John Cornyn of Texas introduced the “Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2004” earlier this month.
The bill authorizes the US president to provide $10 million to foreign and domestic Iranian “pro-democracy” groups such as radio and television networks in order to promote regime change in the Islamic state.
“Those who draft such plans lag behind the times, they live in their daydreams,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference.
“They neither know Iran, nor the Iranian opposition,” he said adding that Washington had been “plotting against Iran ever since the (1979) Islamic revolution” without success.
While Westerners perceive that disillusionment with the 25-year-old Islamic revolution is widespread among Iran’s disproportionately youthful population, opposition to the ruling establishment is weak and disorganized.
Despite appeals by California-based satellite channels run by Iranian exiles for mass demonstrations last month to mark the fifth anniversary of student protests brutally crushed by security forces, there were no large gatherings in Iran.
Nor were there any mass protests in February when Islamic conservatives swept to victory in elections denounced as a sham by reformists.
Political analysts say exile opposition groups such as supporters of the former monarchy or the Iraq-based People’s Mujahedeen organization enjoy negligible support within Iran itself.
Asefi also dismissed a US report linking the Islamic republic to Al-Qaeda as nothing more than election “fodder” in the run-up to November’s presidential polls in the United States.
“A lot of the issues that are being raised nowadays in America are just fodder for their presidential elections. This issue is one of them, and it is utterly without truth,” he said.
“Zionist circles have tried to link Iran to Al-Qaeda, but US officials could not prove any link. Nobody believes them because of serious ideological difference between us and Al-Qaeda,” he added.
“And unlike the people who created Al-Qaeda, Iran has fought them in a practical way,” he said, referring to past links between the United States and Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden.
The US commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide plane attacks alleged Iranian operatives maintained contacts with Al-Qaeda for years and may have provided transit for at least eight of the 19 hijackers.
The commission, in its report released Thursday, said that “intelligence indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior Al-Qaeda figures” after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.
But is also said it found “no evidence” that Iran was aware of the planning for the terror attacks on the United States.
A string of senior Iranian officials have lined up to dismiss the report, playing up their long-term differences and hostility to Al-Qaeda and their Taleban hosts whom the United States toppled in Afghanistan.
