A few days following the forum event which was led by Ambassador Bloomfield Jr., current Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Stimson Center in Washington, the Ambassador and Chairman reacted talking on the regime’s legitimacy in a modern world:
“I interpret most of [the Iranian regime’s] behavior as a reaction to the weakness of their legitimacy; and mostly defensive in nature, which makes them very dangerous.”
During the forum event, points from the US Congressman Royce were scattered by the Iran-American community group OIAC. Retweeting on Iran’s interest’s in Syria: “Assad has to leave”…
… and in another tweet discrediting the regime’s newly elected ‘moderate’ government, he retweeted: “the election in #Iran was between hard liners and very hard liners”…
Picking-up on these points, Ambassador Bloomfield commented on the impact sanctions have in curbing Iran’s continuing human rights’ violations or if it’s time we advanced for a political transition in Iran?
“What troubles me about certain policies in the West is that the wrong people suffer. The goal of policy should be to exert leverage on the rulers in Iran. And this is one of the potential problems with sanctions as a principle policy. It does reflect a moral protest against the government and it is a mark of dishonor for a country to be sanctioned. But it can have the effect of punishing the population, for the sins, as it were, of their rulers.”
And if EU companies making deals inside the clerical regime can ignore the increasing number of human rights’ violations? Ambassador Bloomfield reacted by saying:
“…the American side is facing a great deal of restraint and Congress, similarly, is expressing great concern about letting Iran conduct business with the US dollar internationally, whereas in Europe there seems to be a different perspective, having more to do with the opportunities for selling and making major contracts with Iran, whether or not this benefits the regime.”
And on practical measures the West can put in place to ensure that a new spurring of economic growth in Iran isn’t at a cost of shoveling cash into the regime’s pockets? A point related to Ambassador Bloomfield’s February Forbes OpEd piece ‘Follow Iran’s Money’. To which the Ambassador sees:
“The most productive way to address the behaviors of the Iran regime is to improve our gathering of information and to disseminate it more widely, both to the outside world and to break through the firewalls that the Revolutionary Guards information command is imposing, so that the Iranian people will know, not only that their government is being criticized, but they should have a much more explicit view of where the money is going. That the regime is; how much money the regime controls.”
Finally, this powerful call to action from US Congressman Ed Royce on the importance of being informed retweeted by the OIAC: “let’s help the kids who left Iran to send messages into Iran.”
The full transcript and the audio of Ambassador Bloomfield’s conversation is available here.