IRAN UPDATE

William O.Beeman, 2005 - Continuing his series of articles aimed at exposing Washington's "foolhardy" policy regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, American scholar and writer William O. Beeman says in its quest for regime change in Iran, the United Sates might have "already picked the new rulers of that country".

"The form of government would be a Constitutional Monarchy, with the Head of State being Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in the 1978-79 Islamic revolution, and Sohrab Sobhani as his Prime Minister", Mr. Beeman wrote.

NY Times interview with Raza Pahlavi, June 26, 2009 - You are said to be a leader of the Iranian exile groups working to overthrow the regime whose clerics and mullahs overthrew your father exactly 30 years ago in the Islamic Revolution and forced your family out of the country. What do you do on a day-by-day basis, exactly?

I am in contact with all sorts of groups that are committed to a secular, democratic alternative to the current regime. We believe in a democratic parliamentary system, where there's a clear separation between church and state, or in this case, mosque and state.

Has the American government aided you?

No, no. I don't rely on any sources other than my own compatriots.

But presumably you're working with American agents in the C.I.A. or elsewhere who have been trying to destabilize the Iranian regime for years.

Your presumption is absolutely and unequivocally false.

How did you end up settling in Bethesda, Md., with your wife and children?

It happens to be circumstantial. To me, it's a temporary place to live.

Why would you call your decades of living near Washington 'temporar'?

Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory over Mir Hussein Moussavi in an election that was widely condemned as fraudulent. What do you make of him?

The cry for freedom you hear in the streets of Iran right now is well beyond the fact of whether it's one candidate versus the other. It's about the fact that for 30 years they have been denied their most basic rights.

Many people believe that Moussavi would be more a more moderate president than Ahmadinejad. The same argument was made during the Soviet era, where one would argue that one person would be supposedly more moderate than the other. But at the end, they all represented a Communist, totalitarian system. I think that anyone the Iranian regime prescreens would not be a true representative of the nation.