BRIEF ON IRAN
No. 473
Friday, August 9, 1996

Representative Office of
The National Council of Resistance of Iran
3421 M Street NW #1032
Washington, DC 20007


Feed-the-shark Fallacies, with Overbite, The Washington Times, August 8

The following is excerpts from a column by Arnold Beichman, a research
fellow at the Hoover Institute.

	In the early years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and in the wake of
the Allied military failure to oust the Leninist regime, Lloyd George, then
the British prime minister, came up with an idea of how to tame the
Bolsheviks -linkage, or as some cynics called it, "to smother Bolshevism
with generosity."...
	The metaphorical version of this approach is that if you feed the shark,
his teeth will eventually wear out and he'll lose them.  Unfortunately, the
shark's molars regenerate a row at a time, and the creature is never without
three functional rows of teeth.
	The ghost of Mr. George's linkage policies still wanders about the
corridors of European chancelleries....
	The crucial problems in dealing with international state-sponsored
terrorism are not so much the terrorist states themselves but our European
allies....
	Iran has demonstrated an ability to project its foreign policy aims into
Western Europe, where it is held responsible for assassinating some 50
anti-regime dissidents in exile...
	Germany is Iran's No. 1 trading partner.  Germany is also headquarters for
Iran's terrorist operations in Europe despite arrests and trials....
	... In May 1992, the Associated Press reported that between 1987 through
September 1991 ten American companies... sold with government approval
computers, communication equipment, navigational instruments and other items
with both civilian and military uses.
	It is possible that this kind of high-tech equipment helped the Hadid
Industrial Group, an Iranian war plant, produce a new long-range mortar,
with a range of 2,132 feet, as the alternate terror  weapon to car bomb...
These mortars can be easily disassembled making their transport, say, in a
small pickup feasible.
	Proliferation of long-range mortars is not as dangerous, of course, as
proliferation of nuclear weapons, but it'll have to do for Iran, for the
moment.  Until then, all pickups - in Washington, at least - are guilty
until proven innocent.


Economy Continues to Deteriorate, Iran Zamin News Agency, August 8

	The daily Resalat reported that as a result of government's policies,
inflation has raised by 50% and non-petroleum exports have declined by 28%.
According to Resalat, the reason for the decline of non-petroleum exports
are exchange and export policies that have been in effect since March 1995.
	These policies were adopted to stabilize the exchange rate and to contain
the inflation which in practice increased the rate of inflation and
stagnated the exports.


Iran Court Rules Against two Publications, Reuters, August 8

	TEHRAN - An Iranian court has fined the general directors of two
publications and ordered their temporary removal, newspapers reported on
Thursday.
	Ahmad Safaifard, general director of Akhbar daily and an aide to
Rafsanjani, was fined five million rials ($1,700) and removed from his post
for six months, they said....
	Rahim Said-Danesh of Azarmehr weekly was removed from his post for one year
and fined one million rials ($333) for the dissemination of falsehood in the
March parliamentary election.
	In June the same court banned for eight months the moderate weekly Bahman
which is managed by one of Rafsanjani's deputies Ataollah Mohajerani...


OnNewsLine

	(	Reuters, August 8 -	DUBAI - A U.S. Navy official denied on Thursday
Iran's complaint to the United Nations that American warplanes violated
Iranian airspace and carried out provocative acts three times last Saturday.
	(	Reuters, August 8 - U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato urged the Clinton
administration on Thursday to press Turkey to abandon plans to seal a $20
billion deal to buy Iranian natural gas.
	(	Agence France Presse, August 8 - Iran's official news agency, IRNA,
reported that 10 days after attack by Tehran's army against Iran's
Democratic Kurdish Party inside Iraq, the confrontation between the Iranian
forces and Kurdish rebels has resumed.  According to IRNA, four Kurdish
rebels have been killed in a series of confrontations.
	(	Radio Israel, August 7 - The protest by the workers of bus system in
Varameen [north Tehran] entered its second week.  Despite the fact that the
Revolutionary Guards and security agents have arrested unknown number of
workers, the protest has not ended.
	(	Reuters, August 7 - Thirty people died and others were critically injured
when the bus they were traveling in fell into a river in Iran, Iranian
television said on Wednesday.
	(	Weekly Iran Zamin, August 5 - According to Turkish daily, Sabah, on July
31, Bijan Seyfani, whose name was revealed in the course of the arrest of
members of Islamic movement in Turkey, was expelled from Turkey as an
Iranian spy.