Bushite meddling in Iran– backfiring?

Today’s WaPo had a very interesting article by Karl Vick and David Finkel, that was datelined Teheran and titled U.S. Push for Democracy Could Backfire Inside Iran.
The lead is this:

Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush’s plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don’t need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents.
In a case that advocates fear is directly linked to Bush’s announcement, the government has jailed two Iranians who traveled outside the country to attend what was billed as a series of workshops on human rights. Two others who attended were interrogated for three days.
The workshops, conducted by groups based in the United States, were held last April, but Iranian investigators did not summon the participants until last month, about the time the Bush administration announced plans to spend $85 million “to support the cause of freedom in Iran this year.”
“We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush,” human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. “When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we’re in here suffering.”

The reporters also quote Abdolfattah Soltani, a human rights lawyer who co-founded a human rights defense group with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, as saying of the Bushies’ announcement of the new “pro-democracy” funding for Iranian oppositionists, that

“Unfortunately, I’ve got to say it has a negative effect, not a positive one… This is something we all know, that a way of dealing with human rights activists is to claim they have secret relations with foreign powers… This very much limits our actions. It is very dangerous to our society.”

One other aspect of this story that concerns me is that the workshops that Emad Baghi’s wife and daughter (and two other individuals associated with him) had attended were conducted– in fairly shady-seeming circumstances, in Dubai– by something called the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.
If indeed this “center” has become entangled in pushing forward the Bush administration’s agenda of regime change in Iran, then it seems to me it is dragging the whole name and concept of nonviolent social action into the mud.
Of course, one tip-off there is the name. Few good Gandhians– that is, people struggling nonviolently for a more egalitarian and just world– would proudly put the word “conflict” into the title of their organization.
The ICNC is a US-based organization. The US– my country– is the country that on a daily and continuing basis perpetrates the most violence of any country in the world. Since the invasion of Iraq that it so arrogantly launched in March 2003, scores of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, some at the hands of US forces and others because of the social chaos that the callous US military occupation of Iraq has engendered. In Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other locations around the world, US interrogators and jailers are inscribing their violence onto the bodies of thousands of detainees held in contravention of the laws of war.
Surely, therefore, any individual or organization that is based in the US and that espouses the cause of nonviolence has a primary responsibility to struggle first and foremost for the changing of the policies of our government? The ICNC website says nothing about this at all. Instead, the organization seems to be exploiting the name of “nonviolence” and using a distortion of the principles of that great anti-colonial struggler Mahatma Gandhi merely to further Washington’s imperial agenda.
Oh well, the Bushites shamelessly exploit all the principles of religion. Why should they treat the principles of nonviolence any differently?