The realities of Iranian life are far more harrowing than most people imagine from the outside. Ganji paints a portrait of duplicitous clerics arbitrarily arresting, torturing, mutilating, and executing citizens, all in the name of Islamic Justice. A system of apartheid has been instituted against women. While 60% of the population lives below the poverty line, the mullah regime has hoarded billions of dollars in accounts and properties in Europe, Canada, and Japan. Roughly 70% of the population is under 30 years of age and opposes the regime. In the year of 2001 alone, 220,000 people-mostly educated youth-left the country in search of better lives. Ganji stresses that the best defense against terrorism is offense, and that the United States can and must establish a proactive policy of helping Iranians struggling for the freedom of Iran, in and out of the country.

Western policies toward the Iranian mullah regime have thus far been reactionary rather than proactive. The regime in Iran has been an incubator of international terrorism, aiding and abetting international terrorist groups in and out of the Middle East. The author argues that now is the time for the United States to substitute rhetoric with action in policies toward the ruling clerics in Iran.

MANOUCHEHR GANJI is the founder and Secretary General of the Flag of Freedom Organization of Iran, a democratic opposition movement against the clerical regime in Iran. He also is the founder and Secretary General of the Organization for Human Rights for Iran. Dr. Ganji was the Minister of Education of Iran from 1976 to 1979, and Professor of International Law and Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the Tehran University before the revolution. Dr. Ganji has published extensively on law, human rights, and the situation in Iran in English, Farsi, and French.