You forgot to quote this paragraph:
> In apparent recognition of this trend, Congress last year approved
> $75 million in funding for an administration request to support
> various Iranian opposition groups. However, most of these groups
> are led by exiles who have virtually no following within Iran or
> any experience with the kinds of grassroots mobilization necessary
> to build a popular movement that could threaten the regime's
> survival. By contrast, most of the credible opposition within Iran
> has renounced this U.S. initiative and has asserted that it has
> simply made it easier for the regime to claim that all pro-
> democracy groups and activists are paid agents of the United States.
So you really have nothing.
Doug
On Sep 9, 2007, at 10:18 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>> In other words, you can't offer up a single name. Posts that repeat
>> this smear will go straight to the trash.
>
> If you need an example, take these curious paragraphs from Stephen
> Zunes, which curiously fail to name "certain Western nongovernmental
> organizations."
>
> <http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4456>
> The United States and "Regime Change" in Iran
> Stephen Zunes | August 7, 2007
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> In an effort to head off such a popular uprising and discredit
> pro-democracy leaders and their supporters, Iran's reactionary
> leadership has been making false claims, aired in detail in a series
> of television broadcasts during the third week of July, that certain
> Western nongovernmental organizations that have given workshops and
> offered seminars for Iranian pro-democracy activists on the theory and
> history of strategic nonviolent struggle are actually plotting with
> the Bush administration in offering specific instructions on how to
> overthrow the regime. On several occasions, Iranian authorities have
> arrested and tortured these activists, forcing them to sign phony
> confessions allegedly confirming these allegations.
>
> Some Western bloggers and other writers, understandably skeptical of
> U.S. intervention in oil-producing nations in the name of "democracy,"
> have actually bought into these claims by Iran's hardline clerics that
> prominent nonviolent activists from Europe and the United States—most
> of whom happen to be highly critical of U.S. policy toward Iran—are
> somehow working as agents of the Bush administration. These conspiracy
> theories have in turn been picked up by some progressive websites and
> periodicals, which repeat them as fact. The result has been to
> strengthen the hand of Iran's repressive regime, weaken democratic
> forces in Iran, and strengthen the argument of U.S. neoconservatives
> that only military force from the outside—and not nonviolent struggle
> by the Iranian people themselves—is capable of freeing Iran from
> repressive clerical rule.