On March 20, 2018—the first day of the Persian New Year—with the threat of an Iran war looming, Omid for Iran sponsored an Open Letter to President Trump and Congress. The letter, published in the Washington Post, warned that an Iran war would be a gift to Iran’s supreme leader. The crisis over Iran’s nuclear program allowed Ahmadinejad and the IRGC to plunder Iran’s oil and gas sector in the name of “evading sanctions.” The price tag for the sanctions and corruption binge? $1 trillion in oil and gas revenues diverted into the coffers of a global oil mafia operating under the cover of the IRGC and Iran’s supreme leader.
An Iran war will only fuel another cycle of corruption and extremism. It will allow thieves of state who have used the nuclear crisis to rob the Iranian people out of the basics of life—food, jobs, education, health and housing—to blame the United States for destroying Iran. And what such an Iran war will mean is not only a further curtailment of civil liberties and human rights in the name of national security, but a new cycle of systematic corruption on steroids. In the name of defending the Iranian nation against foreign powers, the IRGC oil mafia will not only gamble with the lives of millions of Iranian youth, but capitalize on the carcass of Iran’s oil and gas sector.
That’s why we are calling for a third way: standing with the Iranian people against a theocracy founded on fear, force and fraud. We don’t need to go to war to call for the abolition of the office of Iran’s supreme leader and the establishment of “a secular government that reflects the sovereignty and protects the interests of the Iranian people.” We need a vigorous campaign against corruption—one that denies Iran’s supreme leader and the oil mafia access to trillions of dollars of funding—money that should be a source of life in Iran, not a source of death in Syria and beyond.
Read the Letter in English or Persian
An Iran war will only fuel another cycle of corruption and extremism. It will allow thieves of state who have used the nuclear crisis to rob the Iranian people out of the basics of life—food, jobs, education, health and housing—to blame the United States for destroying Iran. And what such an Iran war will mean is not only a further curtailment of civil liberties and human rights in the name of national security, but a new cycle of systematic corruption on steroids. In the name of defending the Iranian nation against foreign powers, the IRGC oil mafia will not only gamble with the lives of millions of Iranian youth, but capitalize on the carcass of Iran’s oil and gas sector.
That’s why we are calling for a third way: standing with the Iranian people against a theocracy founded on fear, force and fraud. We don’t need to go to war to call for the abolition of the office of Iran’s supreme leader and the establishment of “a secular government that reflects the sovereignty and protects the interests of the Iranian people.” We need a vigorous campaign against corruption—one that denies Iran’s supreme leader and the oil mafia access to trillions of dollars of funding—money that should be a source of life in Iran, not a source of death in Syria and beyond.
Read the Letter in English or Persian
