If US removes Iran's MEK from list of terrorist organizations, will it matter?

On the current list, the MEK is just one among 48. But many of those groups, while they may be violent and use terror tactics, don't appear focused on the US. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which killed at least a dozen people in a nerve gas attack in Tokyo in 1995, has been dwindling ever since and is tightly monitored. The Abu Sayyaf Group, a kidnap-for-ransom gang with Islamist roots that operates in the southern Philippines, has shown little ability to operate outside that country and neighboring islands. And it's unlikely that Washington is losing sleep at night over the Basque separatist group ETA.

The MEK hasn't killed a US citizen since the 1970s, when it assassinated six Americans – two of them military officers – while it and other groups were trying to oust Iran's US-backed Shah. After the Iranian revolution, the group lost a bloody power struggle and went into exile abroad. Many of its members landed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where they participated in attacks against their native country in the Iran-Iraq war and also helped Hussein's bloody crackdown against Shiite and Kurdish uprisings inside Iraq after the first Gulf War.

In 1992, the group attacked 13 Iranian embassies in various countries.The last successful terrorist attacks attributed to the MEK by the State Department was in 1999, when it assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brig. Gen. Ali Sayyaad Shirazi. The MEK avows to have given up terrorist activity since 2001, but the State Department details MEK terrorist activity through 2003.

In a 1991 report, the State Department wrote that "the MEK sought to counter what it perceived as excessive Western influence in the Shah's regime. Following a philosophy that mixes Marxism and Islam, has developed into the largest and most active armed Iranian dissident group. Its history is studded with anti-Western activity, and, most recently, attacks on the interests of the clerical regime in Iran and abroad." (The most recent State Department report on the MEK can be found here.)

These days, the MEK's leaders insist they're pro-American, and pro-democracy. And as a practical matter it's hard to see them setting their sites on the US – which remains a potential future sponsor, so long as the hostile relationship between Tehran and Washington persists. So the terrorist designation doesn't matter much, if at all, when it comes to directly protecting Americans or enhancing national security.

But the designation as a political question is something else again. The group is widely despised inside Iran, both due to its odd beliefs (Massoud Rajavi, Mrs. Rajavi's husband and the MEK's military leader, forced the dissolution of the marriages of all adherents in the late 1980s, for instance) and its participation on the Iraqi side of the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iranian regime has sought to paint its pro-democracy Green Movement as both a tool of the Western power and as affiliated with the MEK, in an attempt to discredit its political opponents with the Iranian population at large. So a US step in the direction of friendlier relations with the MEK would almost certainly be pointed to as evidence that the US – which has praised the Greens and called for political reform inside Iran – is actually working to install an MEK regime in Tehran. (Mrs. Rajavi already styles herself Iran's "president-elect.") That would both complicate any US efforts to support the Green movement, while also handing the Iranian establishment a bigger cudgel to attack its political opponents with.

It's that political context that worries those who support maintaining the MEK listing. And it's something that any friend of political liberalization in Iran should keep in mind.

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