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Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian-American writer and a non-resident fellow at the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank named after the late U.S. senator whose hawkish views on foreign policy greatly influenced an emerging generation of neoconservatives during the Cold War. Ahmari’s articles and commentaries have been published in neoconservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, as well as a host of more mainstream outlets like Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, and the Boston Globe.[1] He is the co-editor of Arab Spring Dreams, a 2012 collection of essays by young dissidents in the Middle East.

Described by Media Matters writer MJ Rosenberg as “the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Ahmari has been a vocal advocate of U.S.-imposed regime change in his native Iran, which he left as a teenager. Rosenberg likened Ahmari to Ahmed Chalabi, a formerly exiled Iraqi politician who curried favor with U.S. neoconservatives ahead of the Iraq War and lent an Iraqi name to the list of those supporting the U.S. invasion.[2]

Taking to the pages of the right-wing Commentary in March 2012, Ahmari suggested that tensions over Iran’s nuclear program could be used to promote a regime-change agenda. “The Iranian regime’s intransigence with respect to a number of hotly contested issues—above all, its nuclear-weapons program—is setting the stage for a military conflagration between Iran and the West,” he wrote. Noting that such a confrontation “could spell the fall of the clerical regime under the weight of far superior Western militaries,” Ahmari echoed Iraq-era neoconservative claims that U.S.-led regime change in one country would lead to democratization in others. “Regime collapse in Iran,” he wrote, “represents a historic chance for advancing democratic development there and, by extension, the wider Middle East and North Africa.”[3]

Perhaps unwilling to let the nuclear issue slide as a potential wedge for regime change, Ahmari has opposed a potential western policy of “containing” a nuclear Iran, invoking alongside geopolitical concerns a common neoconservative talking point that Iran’s leaders are too irrational to be reasoned with and willing to sacrifice themselves in order to spite the West. “The Iranian regime is [a] complex entity,” he wrote in a March 2012 brief for the Jackson Society, “with multiple factions vying to shape its future. Yet the fact remains that one of these factions—the one currently ascendant in Iranian politics—is genuinely beholden to an apocalyptic, messianic worldview.” He concluded that “Tehran’s ideological extremism—combined with a credible nuclear deterrent—will likely leave Western powers and their Arab allies in an unenviable position: confronting Tehran and risking nuclear catastrophe or acquiescing to Iranian aggression.”[4]

Ahmari has been critical of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a U.S.-based Iranian-American advocacy group that opposes Iran’s clerical regime but favors diplomacy over sanctions and military confrontation. In a February 2012 opinion piece for Foreign Policy, Ahmari and coauthor Peter Kohanloo described NIAC as “decidedly ayatollah-friendly” and suggested that its opposition to U.S.-led regime change in Iran was out of step with the broader Iranian-American community.[5]

Rosenberg, however, noted that a Zogby poll referenced by Ahmari and Kohanloo showed that only 30 percent of the Iranian Americans surveyed listed “promoting regime change” as one of their top priorities for U.S. policy toward Iran. “NIAC opposes the Iranian regime and supported the 2009 protests against it. But it believes that the most effective, and probably only, way to successfully change Iranian behavior is through diplomacy, not sanctions and war threats,” he wrote. “This drives the Iranian neocons nuts.” Rosenberg added that another poll showed that only 3 percent of Iranian Americans favored U.S. military action against Iran.[6]

In a post coauthored for the Weekly Standard blog, Ahmari and Kohanloo suggested that the democratic uprisings of the Arab spring had somehow “revealed the left’s intellectual inconsistency and hypocrisy regarding America’s role in the Muslim world.” Drawing no distinction between calls for the United States to pressure an allied autocratic government and calls to intervene against a hostile one, the authors claimed that progressive groups like Just Foreign Policy and Code Pink had “all but demand[ed] American military intervention” in Egypt but had found “speaking out—let alone acting—in support of Iranian democrats [to be] out of line.”[7]

A piece from February 2011 shows that Just Foreign Policy’s Robert Naiman had called for “specific threats [by the Obama administration] linking U.S. aid to ... the protection of peaceful protests” in Egypt, “the cutting or suspension of particular [U.S.] aid programs” to Egypt, and the “canceling [of] U.S. visas of specific Egyptian officials ... linked to the violence”—far short of military intervention. Moreover, although Naiman expressed doubts about western media reports saying the 2009 elections in Iran were rigged, he added in a September 2009 op-ed, “I strongly sympathize with the protesters' desire for more social freedom, and empathize with their outrage over the crackdown.”

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.