There are reports out of Tehran that Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the man who was robbed in the recent election and whose de-election has sparked so much protest and carnage in Iran, may be arrested for his insolence and sedition. This would be a good thing for two reasons:
First, if Mousavi were to spend the rest of his life in an Iranian prison it would be a much-deserved fate. He approved the kidnapping of the embassy employees during the Carter administration and was instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of American marines and others in bombings in Lebanon in the 1980s.
Former CIA agent Robert Baer explains in Time magazine:
When Mousavi was Prime Minister, he oversaw an office that ran operatives abroad, from Lebanon to Kuwait to Iraq. This was the heyday of Khomeini's theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order. Mousavi was not only swept up into this delusion but also actively pursued it.
It was Mousavi who appointed Iran's ambassador to Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, the Iranian caught red-handed planning the Marine-barracks bombing. Mohtashemi-pur also coordinated the hostage-taking in Lebanon. As a reward, Mousavi gave him the Interior Ministry, where Mohtashemi-pur went on to crack down on what was left of democracy in Iran.
And it is not as if Mousavi kept his support for Iran's secret war on the U.S. a secret. In a 1981 interview, he had this to say about the taking of American diplomats in Tehran in 1979: "It was the beginning of the second stage of our revolution. It was after that we discovered our true Islamic identity."
Mousavi is also an advocate of Iran's nuclear weapons program. His arrest and imprisonment is certainly not something that should be regretted.
Not only would having this man incarcerated in Iran's medieval prison gulag be a tiny glimmer of justice for the families of the Americans whose deaths he facilitated, it would also further inflame Iranian young people who see Mousavi not as someone who shares their aspirations of freedom and democracy, so much, but as a symbol of their hopes to be rid of the current regime. His arrest would further destabilize the mullahcracy in Tehran and that, too, would be a good thing.
Unfortunately, for both these reasons, the mullahs will doubtless refrain from arresting him as long as they can avoid it.
RLC