Democrats and playing on the card of Islamism

Many Iranians believe that Carter's pressure on Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to respect human rights and the release of political prisoners accelerated the fall of the Pahlavi regime. Giscard d'Estaing, the former French President also expressed his common opinion with Iranians in his book. "Carter get off Shah’s back," he wrote, referring to the Guadeloupe conference.

In the early days of November 2015, messages exchanged between US President Jimmy Carter and the Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1979 were removed from the confidential classification of US State Department documents. These documents indicated that the messages exchanged between the United States and Iran by mediation of Ebrahim Yazdi, the first foreign minister of the government in Iran after the 1979 revolution. In one of his messages, Carter expressed concern about the collapse of the Iranian army. The United States was concerned about Soviet influence in Iran at the time and warned of possible provocative activities by members of the Tudeh Party (ezb-e Tūde-ye Īrān) (the most organized Soviet-affiliated party in Iran). In one message, he called on Iranian revolutionaries to ensure the protection of US investment in Iran and the export of Iranian oil to the West, and the Islamist revolutionaries had guaranteed this.

However, just a few months after the victory of the 1979 revolution in Iran with the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran, this promise was not fulfilled, but the relationship between Iran and the United States was severed.

History repeated again in the Middle East in 2012. Another Democratic president, Barack Obama, paved the way for the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, one of America's most important allies in the Middle East. Obama's team, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, argued that the United States no longer had to fear the idea of regional dictators and that it had to choose between extremism or supporting dictators. Democrats believed in dividing Islamists into moderate and extremist groups and they considered Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as moderate and they supported the replacement of Hosni Mubarak by that group.

Now Biden continues the same old game and plays on the card of Islamism. He paved the way for the fall of the US-backed Afghan government by remaining silent in front of the Taliban advancing on Afghanistan and the withdrawal of US troops. Biden seems to believe that the Taliban, an extremist Sunni group, could be used to control Shia Islamic Republic of Iran. The rise of the Taliban also worries China over the re-emergence of autonomous Muslim groups in the country, and it will cause Russia to worry about the rise of Islamism in countries with authoritarian but secular regimes in Central Asia. Biden seems to be repeating the mistake of the United States years ago in using jihadist forces in Afghanistan to confront the Soviet Union, while he is using the Taliban to confront the enemies of the United States (Russia, China and the Islamic Republic of Iran). A dangerous game in which the Afghan people will be the biggest losers.

Nozhan Etezadosaltaneh is an author and political analyst. He has written a book entitled, 'Islamic Parties and the laicist perspective of Turkey,' as
well as several articles about the Middle East and Iran in Iranian
newspapers, including Shargh, Etemaad, Roozegar, and Bahar. He is a
Political Philosophy's Graduated (PhD) in institute for Social and
Cultural Studies Ministry of Science, Research & Technology of Iran

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