The MEK is a terrorist cult that has received funding from all sorts of dubious sources and is often used as a tool by outside groups, states, and organizations, including intelligence services of regional and international state actors, to further an anti-Iran agenda.
According to Habilian Association, Iranian center for research on terrorism, Dr. Emile Nakhleh, former senior intelligence service officer and founding director of the CIA's political Islam strategic analysis program office, has written an article in LobeLog about the US hawks clamoring to attack Iran. In this article, he asserts that the massive destruction of Iraq and the horrendous human and material cost the American “liberation” caused for the country will be child’s play compared to what could happen if Trump and his Israeli and Saudi allies decide to attack Iran.
While comparing the Trump administration’s arrogance and ignorance regarding strategic thinking about the future of Iran after an imaginary collapse of Iranian government with the Bush administration's disregard for warnings about the post-Saddam future of Iraq, Nakhleh states that the Iranophobes within the administration seem to be more obsessed with Iran than the Bush administration was ever with Iraq.
Among the Trump administration policy operatives who provoke Iranophobia, the Council on Foreign Relations member points especially to John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani; the two who have treated the Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK as a legitimate alternative to the current government in Iran. Here, Nakhleh states that in his point of view, the MeK is a terrorist cult:
"The MEK, however, is a terrorist cult that has received funding from all sorts of dubious sources and is often used as a tool by outside groups, states, and organizations, including intelligence services of regional and international state actors, to further an anti-Iran agenda."
In the continuation of his article, Director of the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico warns that the MEK would be an Iranian version of the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition-in-exile to Saddam Hussein led by Ahmed Chalabi, which the neoconservatives in Washington tirelessly promoted in the early 2000s to provide grounds for going to war in Iraq:
"Similarly, the Bush administration viewed Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi émigré, and the organization he founded, the Iraqi National Congress, as the legitimate alternative to the Saddam regime in Iraq. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld fully bought into Chalabi’s snake-oil sales. Chalabi was instrumental in instigating America’s invasion of Iraq at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American and Iraqi lives. Iraq has never recovered from that ill-fated, unnecessary war. Bolton and Giuliani are as susceptible to MEK’s claims as Cheney and Rumsfeld were to Chalabi’s.
